


Far from born again

by mediest



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hollywood, Anal Sex, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:29:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21650812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediest/pseuds/mediest
Summary: The first gig Dorothea helps Sylvain land is an extended stunt cameo in a stoner flick, a chance to commit to self-parody, playing a washed-up child star turned drug dealer. The wardrobe department outfits him in sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts. He grows some scruff and behaves like an acerbic dirtbag for two weeks. “Pitch-perfect casting,” writes the Tribune. Says Entertainment Weekly: “A familiar face in a nearly unrecognizable performance, Gautier looks like he’s having so much fun being loathsome.”-Ex-child actor Sylvain Jose Gautier makes a professional and romantic comeback.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 151
Kudos: 1211





	1. Chapter 1

Between the years 2014 to 2017, Sylvain has only three film credits to his name. Two are supporting parts in forgettable low-budget indies seen by a total of fifty people each. The third is an anthology film in the style of _Paris, Je T’aime_ except that it’s L.A. and mostly stupid. Sylvain plays a guy dating two girls at the same time. His vignette is cut from the theatrical release. Bonus content for the Blu-ray.

In the meantime, Sylvain fucks off to New York. He finishes a second rehab stint. He does a handful of three-episode-long guest-starring roles on TV. He fires his old agent, hires and fires another one, until in 2017 he hires Dorothea, who’s a total force of nature and understands what Sylvain needs more than anyone. The first gig Dorothea helps Sylvain land is an extended stunt cameo in a stoner flick, a chance to fully commit to self-parody, playing a washed-up actor turned drug dealer. The wardrobe department outfits him in sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts. He grows some scruff and behaves like an acerbic dirtbag for two weeks. “Pitch-perfect casting,” writes the Tribune. Says Entertainment Weekly: “A familiar face in a nearly unrecognizable performance, Gautier looks like he’s having so much fun being loathsome.”

In 2018, Dorothea calls him up and says, “I got my hands on Bernadetta’s new screenplay. Are you interested?”

Sylvain mouths _sorry_ to Ingrid, because she hates when he take calls while they’re eating out together, and adds _it’s Dorothea_ , a name that’s granted instant amnesty. To Dorothea, he says, “Always. Who else is involved?”

“Eisner’s producing, Edelgard von Hresvelg’s directing.”

“She’s the one who did the horror movie with the church and all the filicide—”

“The one that really upset some Catholics, yes.”

“Her and Bernie together are an odd match,” Sylvain says. 

“Weirder things have made money,” Dorothea says. “It’s a good script, I think you’ll like it. Check your email and tell me what you think by the weekend.”

“Will do,” Sylvain says. He steals a fry off Ingrid’s plate. Now she’s back to being infuriated. “Thanks, D. Ingrid says hi.”

Sylvain brought Ingrid along to dinner with Dorothea once, and now it’s unclear if Ingrid wants to be her, befriend her, fuck her, or rescue her from 1940s gangsters and then go on the lam for two whirlwind years of passion and adventure before getting married in an Argentinian vineyard. In that last one Ingrid probably also still wants to fuck her too. 

“What’s with that face you’re making at me,” Ingrid says warily, as Sylvain pockets away his phone.

“Nothing,” Sylvain says. “I’m just thinking about how much I like you.”

A few years earlier Ingrid would’ve gotten weird, or suspicious, or flustered. But it’s 2018. All she does is flash half a smile back at Sylvain, pulling her fries back towards herself.

-

When Sylvain opens up his email, he’s expecting Bernadetta’s typical voice, quick and funny and the kind of sad that suckerpunches you. They first met when she’d been brought on as a script doctor late into the process of filming _L.A., Je Fucking Hate You_ , or whatever it ended up being called. She was notoriously shy and avoided being on set, but Sylvain introduced himself on one of the rare occasions she’d shown up. “I know who you are,” Bernadetta blurted out. Looking mortified, she added, “Sorry! I don’t mean—I really don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. I only meant, I like your movies. I think you’re really talented. Crap, I’m sorry.”

This was less than a year after he’d followed Ingrid to NYC, and he still hated being back in L.A., even if it was just for a few days. “Yeah, don’t worry,” Sylvain said, “the worst stuff about me is all true anyway.”

Not his strongest delivery. He heard it inside his voice, the anger, the bullshit. He tried to recover, congratulate her on her recent film festival feature, but Bernadetta’d already heard too. 

The next day of reshoots, Sylvain’s new line was, “I have lied about nothing except sexual fidelity!” His costar Hilda looked him in the eye and replied, “You can’t see it. Lying comes like breathing to you.”

Like he said. Hell of a suckerpunch.

The script sitting in Sylvain’s inbox isn’t funny or sad. He gets now why Edelgard von Hresvelg’s name is attached. A girl’s controlling father dies in a car accident. Her uncle, the father’s younger brother, comes to live with her family in their secluded, beautiful, old-money estate. Boyish, is how the script describes him. He seduces her mother; he seduces her; he poisons them against each other; he brings discord and death until the girl kills and buries him in the garden. It’s a dark fairytale. _A Little Plague_.

He reads it in one sitting and texts Dorothea at three in the morning, _could you get me a meeting? :)_

Dorothea has actual boundaries and doesn’t respond until eight, Pacific time. _Knew you’d like it! Gotcha covered hon_

-

Dorothea gets Sylvain that meeting. She’s good friends with Edelgard, and it doesn’t hurt that Bernadetta, quote, “apparently liked working with you on _L.A., Je Fuck Off_.”

They sit down for coffee in the Palisades, outside in the perfect 80-degree weather and salty ocean air. Edelgard is a serious woman. She stirs her spoon twice through the foam of her cappuccino and says to Sylvain, “I’m here because Dorothea is dear to me, but I have to be honest, you’re a high-risk proposition, both financially and reputationally.”

“I understand that,” Sylvain says, “but I promise I’ve been getting my act together. GQ’s doing a whole profile about it.”

Edelgard doesn’t smile. It’s becoming clear that Sylvain can’t charm her. “What’s your take on the uncle?”

Sylvain has two options here: he can stay in character or he can tell another human being something that’s true about himself. So he says to Edelgard, the uncle’s a plague, but the god that sent him is just the same old immortal child abuse. The girl’s dad was an abuser, right? And the uncle grew up with him. It’s a cycle of intergenerational shit, parent to kid, sibling to sibling, and all of it’s getting revisited upon this girl in the form of this one person. This uncle, who’s dangerous and malevolent, but who also needs to be alluring. Self-destruction is always going to be alluring.

Edelgard says, “That’s interesting.”

“I really want this job, and more importantly I know I can perform the hell out of it for you,” Sylvain tells her. “Can you let me prove it?”

He goes through three rounds of auditions: one on tape, one in person with Edelgard and Bernadetta and their casting director, and one over Skype with Byleth Eisner herself, who’s so tough to read that Sylvain starts to think his camera’s frozen until she finally nods once, with an expression like Sylvain could have just as easily either hung the moon or shit the bed. Then she gives him a thumbs-up.

He does extensive chemistry tests with the girl they’ve already cast as their lead, a relative unknown named Lysithea. He dog-ears and annotates the script into oblivion: questions in the margins, ideas about how to play specific lines of dialogue, notes on character progression.

Edelgard officially offers Sylvain the role a couple days after Christmas. She calls while he’s at the top of a ski slope with Ingrid in Vermont, which has become their annual tradition after what they both refer to as The Lost Year. As soon as he hangs up, Sylvain throws himself down the side of the mountain, trying to catch up to Ingrid, shouting, “I got it! I got it!” Ingrid shouts back, “That’s great, slow down, oh my god Sylvain don’t you fucking dare—”

That evening, Hollywood Reporter tweets: “Gautier confirmed for new von Hresvelg project.” BuzzFeed releases “12 Times Sylvain Gautier Was Sylvain Gautier.” A fundamentalist Christian blog with a grudge writes, “Match made in hell? Inflammatory director Edelgard von Hresvelg casts morally depraved former child star.” 

Ingrid, who’s slowly finding it within herself to forgive Sylvain for sending them both flying face-first into a snowdrift, says, “Stop reading that garbage. I’m serious.”

“I’m a masochist, Ingrid. Public opinion gets me hot,” Sylvain says, but he abandons his laptop anyway to join Ingrid outside on the freezing hotel room balcony. Ingrid isn’t sympathetic; she’s the one who told him not to take his sweater off. Sylvain wraps his arms around himself and breathes in deep. The air is cleaner out here. The resort village lights gleam like remote planets in the blue darkness. It’s beginning to snow.

-

Principal photography for _A Little Plague_ begins July 2019. Edelgard loses her assistant director Randolph to a family emergency in late June. Apparently his sister’s pretty seriously ill and he needs to be home. Production launches itself into a mad scramble. Any delays are going to cost serious money. The cast and crew is already on location in middle-of-nowhere Washington, an hour or so from Seattle, holed up in hotels and rented houses, taking turns talking Bernadetta down from the proverbial ledge.

At the very last minute, Edelgard finds a replacement. On the first day of filming, she drops by Sylvain’s trailer personally. Sylvain pushes his headphones down to hang around his neck as he answers the knock at the door.

“Don’t tell me Ferdinand quit too,” he says to Edelgard, before the lightness slides off his face. 

“I wanted to make sure I introduced you to our new AD,” Edelgard says. “Sylvain, this is Felix.”

-

Sylvain is showing up regularly in tabloids by age 15. That’s just what happens when you petition to be emancipated. The official narrative is that becoming a legal adult will free Sylvain from the restrictions of child labor laws, but there’s a lot of public speculation about whether it’s actually because Sylvain’s dad has been mishandling all of his money. Both are close enough to the private reality, and good enough stories to get Sylvain the outcome he wants. He’s not about to stand in front of a judge and describe the time Miklan backhanded him across the face so hard he went temporarily deaf in his right ear.

The emancipation stuff blows over and gives way to frequent appearances in “Hot or Not?” columns. “Hot,” the voice of the people adjudicates. The way everyone looks at Sylvain feels like a rash, deep under his body’s surface. It makes him want to claw through his own skin just to get at it. He starts leaving the house in increasingly weird outfits, flashy patterns, clashing colors. “Uh, hot?” the voice of the people responds, confused. Around the holidays, pictures of Sylvain with his biceps out in the middle of winter, wearing a tight novelty t-shirt that reads _I’m so good Santa came twice_ , provoke vicious internet comment section arguments.

Then, in 2013, at age 21, he stars in a biopic as a young Bram Stoker. Who knew the guy who wrote Dracula was also a redhead? Sylvain’s Irish accent is less-than-perfect, but he’s nailing the Victorian repression. He devours biographies as research. One historian hypothesizes that Stoker was deeply closeted, and Sylvain runs with the idea without informing anyone. Just spends the whole film looking at the guy playing Oscar Wilde like he loves him and hates him and hates himself. It’s not hard. Felix has a pretty, sharp face, and a blunt guardedness that can’t hide the way he unfurls under Sylvain’s attention like a cactus in the wet season. He’s also the director’s son, but Rodrigue Fraldarius is someone who makes every annual “Most Important Living Filmmakers” list, so maybe he’s earned the right to a little nepotism.

Months in London on set together and the whole time (give or take) Sylvain acts friendly and professional. This is his job. But the wrap party means the job’s over, right? Their production team rents out a rooftop penthouse, and Felix looks irresistible under the hanging fairy lights, drinking his beer as the sky darkens. 

They don’t do anything exceptional. They grab a bite to eat after the party and then they walk through a park on their way to drinks nearby, shooting the shit about dream projects. “A remake of _Cocktail_ ,” Sylvain says. “I play the Tom Cruise character, Soderbergh directs, we bump the rating up to NC-17.”

“Nobody wants to see that,” Felix says, and Sylvain grins and says, “You look like you do,” which makes Felix go bright red and push Sylvain aggressively off the path, into some shrubbery. 

Nice try. Sylvain grabs Felix’s arm and brings Felix along. They slam into a tree together. Felix’s shoulder lodges against Sylvain’s solar plexus. All the air leaves Sylvain with an injured groan. Rough bark digs into his spine. It doesn’t stop the grinning. When he’s fairly sure Felix won’t try to hit him again, he brushes a fallen leaf out of Felix’s hair. Felix gazes up into Sylvain’s face, eyes radiant and knifelike. He isn’t blushing anymore. 

“Fuck,” Felix mutters. “You’re going to be trouble.”

They’re abroad. People don’t know Sylvain the same way over here. And, listen, Sylvain isn’t stupid: he _checks_ to make sure nobody’s around.

His face is all over TMZ the next week anyway. The pictures show him standing outside a bar, leaning down to kiss a person who’s half-obscured by shadow, beautiful, obviously male. The worst part is that he actually looks really fucking happy. 

-

When the blood stops pounding in his ears, Sylvain finds that he’s able to say pretty effortlessly, “We’ve met.”

There’s no way Felix didn’t receive a cast list. He must’ve read it before accepting the job, so at least one of them knew this was coming. He makes eye contact with Sylvain and it’s like Sylvain’s being run over by a dump truck transporting a thousand different emotions and each one weighs a fucking ton. Felix looks older. He looks like his famous dead brother. He looks like a grenade that blew up Sylvain’s life. He looks exactly the same.

“I didn’t realize you two knew each other,” Edelgard says. “Have you worked together before?”

“A long time ago,” Felix says. Then, to Sylvain: “Hey.”

Over five years and he gets a “hey.” Nobody can accuse Felix of being inconsistent. 

“Hey,” Sylvain replies. “This’ll be fun.”

-

It actually is fun. The girl’s mother is being played by Broadway legend Manuela Casagranda herself, and she and Sylvain get on like a house on fire. She tells the wildest stories. Some of the ones about her _Officers Academy_ castmates make Sylvain spill water all over himself while they’re blocking out a scene.

“Fuck,” Sylvain wheezes. “Green down there too, huh.”

“Completely green,” Manuela says slyly. “I admit, he looked intriguing. Stern, yet festive.”

“Stop,” Sylvain pleads, “I’m gonna die.”

Manuela taps her cheek with a manicured nail. “It’s your turn to share a story. You must have some good ones.”

Her interest comes off as mostly nonjudgmental. Manuela’s seen and heard it all. 

“That depends on what you mean by good,” Sylvain says. “Sorry, Annie,” as Annette flits over to blot his slacks dry and take his water bottle away.

“Better on you than on the hardwood,” she chirps. It’s true, it feels like over half the budget is being spent on location. The parlor room of this gothic revival mansion is sculpted and lush. It’s a warm and sinister place somewhere outside of time: sage green walls, white interior trim, deep mahogany accent furniture. Edelgard’s production designer scouted over 50 properties before finding this house, and anytime Sylvain touches a piece of set dressing he doesn’t need to be touching, Hubert’s shadow appears out of nowhere, looming dangerously. He’s looming right now, over in the corner. Does the guy sleep? Does he eat? Sylvain smiles anyway, friendly-like. 

Edelgard’s still talking something over with Lysithea, using her hands to describe the way the camera’s going to push in. It’s the scene where she and Sylvain first meet. Ruin is knocking. Come open the door. 

Felix hovers nearby, reviewing the shot list. His hair is tied back into a loose bun. If Sylvain was standing behind him, he’d see the pale nape of Felix’s neck.

Now that they’re two weeks in, Sylvain is getting used to seeing these parts of Felix again. Talking to Felix again, but not the way they used to. Felix will say “let’s put down those marks” and “here are tomorrow’s sides” and Sylvain will say “got it” and “thanks” and in-between they move around each other like giant ships around icebergs. Is it fair game to ask Felix how he’s been? Is Sylvain expected to act as if there’s no history? Will looking at Felix for too long pierce through Sylvain’s hull and kill him?

Sylvain’s self-preservation instinct isn’t great, but it’s better than that. He gives Felix his space.

“Okay, I got a story,” Sylvain says. He’ll tell the one about Lorenz getting stuck in a 12-wire rig, gracefully and desperately informing the crew that he needed to piss. It’s a riot.

Manuela says delightedly, “Let’s hear it.”

-

One byproduct of shooting your movie in a small city in the Pacific Northwest is that there’s nothing else to do but get to know each other. After hours they gather inside a local bar that’s dark and divey. The bathrooms are wallpapered with old Playboys. Every other surface is suspiciously sticky and covered in peanut dust, but the dart boards are adequate grounds for a Grips vs. Electrical tournament. 

Sylvain joins Team Electrical so he can play against Leonie, the key grip on set, because she comes across like the type of person who won’t truly respect you unless you can beat her at something. This fact only makes Sylvain determined to win her over.

He loses, but it’s close. Leonie’s appreciation grows three sizes that day.

“Good game.” She slaps him cheerfully on the shoulder. Wow, she’s strong. “What’re you drinking?”

“Thanks,” Sylvain says, a couple minutes later when Leonie returns to their tall bar table with Sylvain’s club soda with lime and another whiskey for herself. “Alright, what’s your story? You gotta tell me how you became such a beast at darts.”

“You’re not going to believe me,” Leonie says.

“Try me.”

“Well,” Leonie hedges, “I grew up in the circus.”

“Bullshit,” Sylvain says immediately.

“I told you! My parents were a high-top couple. I learned to walk the wire when I was four. I could juggle, throw knives, I had an aerial act, all that stuff.”

“You’re serious?” Sylvain leans closer, enchanted. “What was it like?”

Leonie sips her whiskey and says thoughtfully, “It was exciting. I got to see and experience so much, but it was also hard, painful work, you know? My coach used to say, if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not the circus. And money was always pretty tight. I left so I could go to school. My troupe even helped me pay tuition. Everyone was really supportive.”

“Ever miss it?” Sylvain asks.

“Sometimes,” Leonie admits. “It’s where I came from. But you can’t perform forever.”

Sylvain says, “Sure. I get that.”

Leonie is part of the half of the crew that was hired locally. The other half was hand-picked by Edelgard. A lot of these working relationships are nearly a decade long. It gives that entire group of people a charismatic but impenetrable quality. Nobody on the other side of the glass will ever know why their film editor Linhardt gets away with literally sleeping on the job. Nobody will ever have the full context for why the director of photography and the production designer come across like mortal enemies half the time, and other times like they’re acting out some twisted Edwardian-era courtship. Oh, Ferdinand, I must confess I do so adore you, now come flash me another titillating glimpse of your ankles, you little minx. 

Felix walks through the door around the time Leonie and Sylvain have migrated towards the jukebox. He usually doesn’t show up to these hang-outs. They conflict with the schedule for reviewing dailies, and also with Felix’s core personality. 

His presence today could have something to do with Annette, who’s ushering him further inside, armed with her persistent, shrewd sweetness. “One drink,” she’s saying. “You’ve had a long week—”

“It’s Tuesday—”

“And Monday was so long. Look, there’s Sylvain and Leonie. You like them. Hi guys!”

“Hey,” Leonie says, bent over the jukebox. She makes a selection that Annette recognizes instantly, her small face brightening. In less than a minute she and Leonie are engrossed in conversation about ‘90s hip hop.

That leaves Sylvain standing next to Felix. Outer space would be easier to navigate than this.

“How’d Annie convince you to come?” Sylvain finally asks. “Extortion? Kidnapping?”

Felix shrugs. “She just asked me.”

Sylvain turns to face Felix incredulously. “Are you kidding me? You’ve known her for two weeks.”

“So?” Felix says.

“So I remember it taking me two weeks to convince you to make _eye contact_ with me.”

Felix stiffens. Sylvain’s mouth snaps shut. One memory always resuscitates another. It walks right up to the prison of your brain and drags an old feeling kicking and screaming into the sunlight. 

“It wasn’t two weeks, it was only one,” Felix says. His gaze drifts restlessly away from Sylvain, onto the peeling music posters surrounding the jukebox. Sylvain wishes he could tell what Felix was thinking. He used to be able to. “And it was because you kept fucking with me. You asked me to jump in a lake together with you but when you counted to three I was the only one who actually jumped.”

Shit, Sylvain’d almost forgotten. “You looked so cold,” he says, trying not to grin. “Like a cat that got rained out. I felt so bad.”

Felix huffs. “You were such an asshole.”

For a moment, it ends there. Annette and Leonie put on a new song—sexy, nostalgic. 

“I wasn’t _trying_ to fuck with you,” Sylvain adds eventually. “I honestly was going to jump. I just chickened out at the last second, and I didn’t think you were gonna go through with it either.”

“Well I did,” Felix says.

Afterwards Felix’d sat on the pier, wrapped up in a blanket, vibrating with anger and humiliation, untouchable. He gave Sylvain the cold shoulder for days, until the morning Sylvain stood on the studio lot and enlisted the film crew to help empty a 5-gallon bucket of freezing water over his own head. The world’s coldest method of atonement. His body freaked out, muscles paralyzed, lungs reflexively gasping for air. By the time Sylvain calmed down, there was a warm fluffy towel over his shoulders. He opened his eyes and Felix was standing there. “You’re such an asshole,” Felix’d said back then, the same way he said it just now. Like it was something true about Sylvain, but not the most important part of him.

Felix also says, “I’m getting a drink,” clearly giving himself an exit route. He pauses before leaving. “You want anything?”

“Nah,” Sylvain says. “I’m good.”

He doesn’t watch Felix walk away, but can’t help glancing over a minute later. Felix is leaning against the bar, talking to the bartender, his hair bewitching and familiar under the dim yellow light. Sylvain stares for too long this time. Felix catches him in the act. For some indeterminate amount of time they simply look at each other from across a dark space, floating through foreign atmosphere, removing their helmets to find that the air’s still breathable.

-

Later that week Sylvain has a lunch date with Bernadetta. She’s been writing a novel on-and-off and Sylvain’s dying to read it. “C’mon, Bernie,” he’d said, hands raised, non-threatening, “it’s just me,” and Bernadetta went pink and exclaimed, “ _Just_ you?” with the squeaky voice of someone who definitely recalled Sylvain’s beachy sun-kissed GQ profile from last year. Eventually she agreed, but they _had_ to do it in the production trailer when nobody else was around, the window blinds _had_ to be shut, and Sylvain _had_ to give her his honest feedback. 

Between Sylvain and Bernadetta’s novel stands Felix, loitering outside the production trailer, smoking a cigarette, his back half-turned. No big deal. Sylvain can say hi, make up a reason, Bernadetta gets to keep her privacy. But then he sees that Felix is speaking softly on the phone.

“Can you blame them? You need a haircut and a better office. It looks like you’re running stock fraud, not signing movies.” He’s talking shit, but Felix sounds almost warm. “Yeah, well Claude goes for that sort of thing.”

He drags on his cigarette, listening to the response. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Use it as motivation. Buy a potted plant.”

An approximation of a smile flickers across Felix’s face. “Whatever. Bye, Dima.”

Sylvain hears that and turns the fuck back around.

 _raincheck?_ he texts. _feeling kind of off, gonna lie down_

 _oh ok_ , Bernadetta shoots back. _feel better_

Sylvain doesn’t know if Felix notices him. It doesn’t matter. He gets back to his own trailer and sits down on the couch and tries to get a fucking grip.

He doesn’t want to get all messed up over this. He and Felix don’t owe each other anything anymore, if they ever did. But his mind’s spiraling anyway, pulling long-dead bodies out of the river. So that’s how it is? All this time, turns out Felix didn’t have some kind of genetic inability to stick around in people’s lives, just an intentional unwillingness to stick around in Sylvain’s?

He digs both palms hard against his eyes. Forget it. Clean slate, right? It was years ago. 

His phone buzzes. It’s Bernadetta again. 

_actually I was looking forward to hearing your opinion… if you’re feeling up for it, I could come to you and read some of it to you?_

_you’re my #1, Bern_ , Sylvain tells her.

-

Sylvain’s first role is for a kids’ cereal commercial. 9 years old, cheerfully spooning colorful fruity cereal into his face. From there he gets cast in a number of comedic dramas, almost all of them about men trying to connect with their families but they’re too caught up with work or divorce or mid-life existentialism. Sylvain says variations of the line, “You forgot my birthday _again_?” in like three different films. His mom’s favorite is the one with the dog. She cries at the ending and kisses Sylvain’s cheek when the lights come back on in the theater. It’s his best memory of her.

Talk show hosts love him. Magazines call him cute until puberty hits and turns him into a tree. At a party an agent tells Sylvain he’s “mature beyond his years” as he grabs his ass. 

As a teenager, Sylvain plays, in order: a foster kid on the run (“a balance of fierce smarts and sensitivity,” the reviews say), the body-snatched best friend in a kitschy sci-fi thriller (“moviegoers looking to waste some time could do much worse”), and Puck in a modern adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that nobody actually likes but it still somehow makes an exorbitant amount of money. There’s this other role too, called Blitzed 18-Year-Old Kid. “Sylvain’s young and he likes to party,” states his PR team. “He’s just having fun.”

Then comes the major break-through: Rhea’s nightmarish Vietnam horror story disguised as a prestigious historical war flick. Rhea, just the one name, like Cher or Diddy. Sylvain plays a young soldier who gets drafted. The character enters the movie fresh and idealistic, and leaves it hollow and traumatized. It’s a grueling set, physically and mentally. A half-year marathon of emotional deprivation, but all Sylvain says during the press junket is, “Rhea’s a genius,” interview after interview. “Sylvain Gautier delivers on the promise he has shown in so many roles before,” writes the New Yorker. Remember the name, everyone’s saying. A critical darling with broad popular appeal. And just look at that body, those eyes. Granted, he’s a bit of a wildcard, but isn’t that part of the attraction? Aren’t we a forgiving sort of industry?

He gets introduced to Spielberg at the Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty and the very next day there are rumors about a future project. He can’t buy flu medication without being photographed. He dates a few models who are significantly older than himself, and “Sylvain Gautier Bravely Defies Traditional Hollywood Gender Age Gaps” and “Sylvain Gautier, Feminist?” trend for a week.

So the post-London fallout isn’t anything Sylvain hasn’t seen before. Cameras just an extra inch closer to his face. Gossip just a touch more personal and violating. Sylvain, feeling just a little more protective of this fragile moment of his life, a little more hostile to the deluge of questions. Who’s the other guy? Is he an actor too? Everybody loves a good guessing game. Felix’s name comes up—the photos aren’t _that_ poorly lit, and people know he was in London at the same time. 

But then Glenn Fraldarius dies in a freak car accident a few days later. Dimitri Blaiddyd, who was in the passenger seat, barely makes it to the hospital in time. His medical reports leak: internal bleeding, head trauma, a punctured lung. 

In the aftermath, Felix vanishes off the face of the planet, and Sylvain is left standing alone knee-deep in shit. 

Are you in a relationship? Have you always been interested in men? Those past girlfriends, were they just PR? How do you think this will affect your work? Here’s a guy who says the two of you hooked up at a nightclub—care to comment? Do you think you’re pulling focus away from your talent by making the conversation all about your sexual preferences? Do you think audiences will be able to see you as a believable leading man after this? Sylvain’s career hits a brick fucking wall. Directors lose interest. Interest among journalists remains volcanic. They want to know where he’s going. They want to know how he’s feeling. They want to know who he’s fucking. They want to watch him implode? Sylvain’s a people-pleaser. He’ll give them what they fucking want.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fuck me I'm out of control!
> 
> title from [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdj2A4yN0A)  
> dialogue for “l.a., je fuck off” is lifted from “two girls and a guy” (1997)  
> the bram stoker biopic doesn’t exist but the biography does: david skal’s “something in the blood”  
> bernie & edelgard’s movie is essentially a remix of “stoker” (2013)  
> sorry my bad @ inevitable glaring inaccuracies about filmmaking, film crews, etc.


	2. Chapter 2

Amidst the yoga and equestrian activities and acupuncture and recovery diets, celebrities in luxury rehab can also enjoy some good old-fashioned art therapy. Start with a human silhouette. Draw in the “hot spots” of the body where you feel negative emotion. Anything goes. Fill the body’s head with a black cloud, or dark blue water all the way up to the shoulders. Yellow squiggles coming out of its mouth and hands, if you want to scream and hit something. 

The studio delays the Bram Stoker biopic release by a month after Glenn’s death. Rodrigue handles the press tour as well as any mourning father would. He accepts condolences with grace and deflects any questions about Felix going AWOL with practiced diplomacy.

To balance Rodrigue out, Sylvain goes all-in on shitty behavior. He gets publicly and spectacularly fucked up in the evenings. He alternates between flirty and abrasive during the daytime. A female interviewer sits down and Sylvain tells her, “That dress looks amazing on you. What’re you doing after this?” Someone gets halfway through a question about the link between Sylvain’s sexuality and his character’s before Sylvain interrupts, “What’s _your_ sexuality? Fair’s fair, right? What do you get up to at night?” A morning talk show invites the main cast live on-air and Sylvain spends the whole 10-minute segment trading sugary little barbs with the host. “How was the experience filming in London?” she asks. “It looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

Sylvain says winsomely, “Oh, yeah, your husband and I had a fantastic time.”

That last one earns Sylvain a long, pissed off phone call from a studio executive.

“Everything That’s Gone Wrong On The Bram Stoker Press Tour,” publishes E!News. “Sylvain Gautier’s Interviews Are A Beautiful Disaster,” Gawker writes gleefully. _Is everything ok?_ Ingrid texts. 

_yup_ , he texts back. He shows up high to a press conference in Germany and the expression on Rodrigue’s face is awful and transparent: you’re a smart kid and you’re throwing it away. With all that misguided understanding, it’s no wonder he and Felix don’t get along.

He doesn’t know who Rodrigue talks to after that, but Sylvain gets dropped from the rest of the junket. He flies home from Berlin. At the urging of his publicist, he checks into a clinic in Malibu for 30 days, at $1,300 a night. Ten acres overlooking the ocean, two juice bars, a marble bathtub in each private bedroom, and a perfect outdoor pool that Sylvain takes advantage of every day. He swims laps until his body aches and his mind washes out, then he drags himself out of the water to lie in the sun, and altogether that’s more or less Sylvain’s first rehab experience. Shimmery blue pools and warm sunshine and making friends with the staff until someone smuggles in some contraband on his behalf.

He’s lived in L.A. for years and never gotten used to the weather. The Fraldariuses are dynastic. Rodrigue is a legend and Glenn was one of the youngest Academy Award winners in history. The Blaiddyds were straight-up royalty in this town, back when more of them were still alive. Not Sylvain’s family: they’re cold New England folk. Some days he still has to punch the accent out of his own mouth. First-generation Hollywood, but early on Sylvain’s parents saw that their kid had something special and shining and usable inside of him. Hope they’re proud now. Hope Miklan sees the headlines way out in Backwater, Massachusetts and thinks, _He’s the piece of shit I always knew he was._

Sylvain starts with a human silhouette. He fills it in red. Slow, methodical, dragging the color back and forth until the image is completely opaque. 

Then, in black, he writes “FUCK YOU” across the entire body, just for fun. 

-

The ferry ride to the island is only half an hour. That’s plenty of time for Sylvain to hang out on the boat deck and be regaled by Leonie’s local history lessons as the wind whips through their hair. 

“The expeditions exploring this region used to be super dangerous and dismal,” Leonie says. “That’s why everything out here has names like Useless Bay and Cape Disappointment.”

Their gaffer Raphael, who’s also a local, chimes in, “Destruction Island. That one’s pretty gnarly.”

“These are all just nicknames people gave me in high school,” Sylvain laughs. 

There’s a 180-foot tall bridge on the island called Deception Pass. It’s a dark, moody steel structure that arches across hazardous churning waters and rugged cliffs. In the script, this is where the girl’s father dies. Edelgard wants to shoot Sylvain under the bridge at golden hour, standing on the beach, touching his palm against the surface of the water. It’s supposed to be ambiguous: did he kill his own brother? Is he glad he’s dead?

Sylvain and Edelgard and Bernadetta sat down to talk it over together before filming even started, so that they’d all be on the same page. They agreed: Sylvain did kill him, but he isn’t glad he’s dead. Sometimes it’s more complicated. You live with a darkness for long enough and you miss it when it’s gone. You look in the mirror and you see it lurking inside the glass instead. 

“Hey, Felix,” Leonie calls out. “What were you like in high school?”

Felix is leaning against the railing nearby, sending emails on his phone. He says without looking up, “I was on the fencing team.” Just drops that bomb like it’s nothing. 

Leonie lights up. “Seriously? Were you any good? Which weapon did you compete with?”

“We lost Leonie,” Sylvain says, as they watch a two-person sword convention organize right in front of their eyes. 

“Redheads dig Felix,” Raphael says guilelessly. Everyone on set has noticed the Annette Thing. 

“I think he prefers blondes,” Sylvain says.

Felix definitely hears. The way he’s standing shifts; he straightens up distrustfully. Sylvain tries to wrestle the desire to be mean back inside its cage. 

Raphael, who has a thick head of blond hair himself, smacks Sylvain’s abs in a friendly gesture and says, “You’re funny, man.”

-

After the car accident, Dimitri is not well. There’s no nicer way of saying it. He leaves his uncle to run the family company. Faerghus Pictures stock plummets. A series of baffling film distribution and marketing decisions leaves the company hemorrhaging even more money. Then Dimitri reappears five years later and reclaims his throne. He ousts Cornelia from the board of directors. He launches a company-wide inclusion rider policy. His hair has grown out (think Kurt Cobain, ‘90s grunge), the accident has left him with permanent vision damage (think Kurt Russell, _Escape From New York_ ), but he looks healthier too. More meat on his bones. More resolution. He’s photographed often with a tall, handsome, and intimidating-looking man whose name isn’t public so the internet calls him Hot Bodyguard. 

The first movie Dimitri signs is Claude von Riegan’s neo-noir crime comedy with Hilda playing a cynical private eye and Lorenz playing her homme fatale. Critics don’t know what to make of it. It’s a sleek, smart piece of filmmaking, but the ending takes a turn. Both leads are killed off and the perspective shifts onto a supporting character: this kid with brown skin and amber eyes who lost his parents as collateral damage in one of Hilda’s shootouts. “It’s a test,” Claude says with an easy smile at the premiere, “of whether audiences can accept someone like him as the real protagonist.”

Audiences are mixed. The movie barely breaks even, but Dimitri doubles down. Projects with a distinct point of view—that’s the new mission statement.

Sylvain has never personally met Claude, but he ran into Dimitri for the first time back when he was 19 and nominated for Best Young Performer at the Critics’ Choice Awards. “You deserve it,” Dimitri said, and Sylvain could tell he meant it earnestly. For someone so mild and polite, he had a certain presence, a gravitational pull. Like he probably remembered your grandma’s name. Consistently used turn signals while driving. Enjoyed hearing about how your day was, all the mundane details that made it personal. He was someone Sylvain could easily picture other people devoting themselves to, and understand why. Some guys were just like that. In any sky there always had to be a sun. 

-

It’s only a matter of time before production on _A Little Plague_ is set back by infamous Washington weather. Sylvain and Lysithea are supposed to be shooting a scene in the sunny garden: he shows her how to dethorn the wild roses with a small paring knife, clipping off what protects them from being crushed or eaten. But noon rolls around and the rain shows no sign of ending. It’s the kind of rainfall that’s gentle and cool but dreary and lasting. 

“The forecast indicates—hm.” Linhardt looks up from the weather app on his phone. “I’d rather not be the messenger.” 

“Rain all week,” Caspar says, reading over Linhardt’s shoulder. “Except maybe Thursday. Thursday’s got a lil’ gray cloud with three lines under it.”

“That’s fog,” Linhardt says.

“Dude, it could be windy, horizontal rain—”

Edelgard’s poise is steadily fraying. She takes a deep breath, one hand on her hip. In her other hand, a cup of coffee materializes. “Thank you, Hubert,” she says. 

Indoor scenes get moved up the schedule. The art department rushes to set up the interiors, Caspar yells at the sky, and Ferdinand proposes that grabbing some establishing shots in the rain could be “very cinematic, don’t you think?” Everyone’s trying to figure out how to salvage the day from being a total wash. Sylvain borrows an umbrella and kills time outside on the mansion’s wraparound porch, going back over his lines. To tell the truth (which he won’t, because he can read the room), he likes this weather. The overcast sky, the dense mist. It reminds him of a different city.

The front door opens. Felix exits for a smoke break. He looks stressed out; it takes him a couple tries to light his cigarette. The rainwater is making his hair frizz. It’s the type of soft detail that makes Sylvain momentarily forget why he ever wanted to stay away.

Sylvain slides over, inch by inch, under they’re both sheltered under his umbrella.

Felix looks up at him. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Sylvain says.

They both allow the silence to crawl along. Felix smokes his first cigarette down to nothing. Then he lights a second one and asks bluntly, “Is there something you need to say to me?”

Sylvain glances up from the script he stopped reading five minutes ago. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve been obnoxious and shitty to me all week,” Felix says. “What’s your problem?”

“You really don’t hold back,” Sylvain marvels. He adds, “There’s no problem. Honestly.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Felix says. “I know you.”

Alright, that hits Sylvain’s resentment right in its sweet spot. “You know me? It’s a good time for you to know me again?”

Felix bristles. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Sylvain runs a hand through his impeccably styled hair. Annette is not going to like that. “Did you ever think—maybe it was an asshole move to decide without any warning that you wanted nothing to do with me,” he laughs. “Maybe that was also kind of shitty.”

Understanding strikes Felix’s face.

“Sylvain,” he says, like a brewing storm.

“I mean, it was pretty cold not to even show up to the press tour.” 

“I’m not _sorry_ for not wanting to travel around the world talking to strangers about my dead brother.”

“I’d never expect an apology from you, Felix.”

It takes a mountain of effort for Sylvain to keep his voice and posture in casual territory, in the memory of anger and not the real thing. _I needed you. I needed you and where the fuck were you?_

Felix wouldn’t know casual if it slapped him in the face. “What do you want me to say?” he grits out.

Sylvain says, only half-kidding, “That you were tortured by the thought of me every day.”

Felix’s expression makes Sylvain think, for a split second, he’s either going to get kissed or punched. 

“Trust me,” Felix says, “I saw your face everywhere.”

It’s more like getting shot. Sylvain’s chest pounds. He knows exactly which face he showed the world that year. A part of him had hoped Felix was holed up in a doomsday bunker, a monastery, the Antarctic wilderness, somewhere unreachable by Sylvain’s war against himself. 

After a quiet, agonizing moment, Felix offers Sylvain his cigarette. Sylvain accepts it without a second thought. Cigarettes are his last remaining chemical indulgence. He smokes until he feels the bloody hole in his chest start to stitch itself back up.

Then Felix says, “I didn’t want nothing to do with you.”

Sylvain passes Felix back his cigarette. “Yeah?”

“I wanted nothing to do with anyone.”

“Oh, that’s way better,” Sylvain says.

Felix ignores the jab and looks back out onto the damp green mansion lawn. In the gray afternoon light, it’s all visible, like the truth of an optical illusion coming into focus: the hard set of Felix’s shoulders, the flash in his eyes, the way his own anger never stops intersecting with hurt.

“After Glenn died,” Felix says, low and exposed, “everyone told me how the world had lost a great talent. I hated that. He was my brother first. I hated L.A., the people, I hated my old man for not hating it too. I wanted to cut everything out of my life because I thought isolation meant freedom.”

Sylvain leaves the thought of, “You didn’t cut out Dimitri,” locked up inside himself. Felix has just chosen to give him something that he didn’t need to give. Sylvain doesn’t want to punish him for that.

“I’m sorry about Glenn,” he responds instead. 

“I know. You sent flowers to the funeral.”

Sylvain only recalls bits and pieces. Drunkenly rereading all those articles. _The Fraldarius family requests the media respect their privacy in this time of mourning._ Searching for a cosmic sign that Felix wanted to hear from him. Trying to read the tea leaves of Felix’s grief from miles away. Then Felix made his feelings very clear in a viral video where he almost hit a paparazzo in the face, and Sylvain dialed the number of a florist instead.

Chicken or the egg? Who let who down first? Even if Felix hadn’t let go, there’s no guarantee that Sylvain himself wouldn’t have sawed Felix’s hand off anyway.

“Were they good flowers?” Sylvain asks, as Felix finishes his cigarette.

Felix exhales a lungful of smoke and says, “You sent a giant bouquet of red roses. It was actually kind of inappropriate.”

Sylvain doesn’t mean to laugh. “Fuck, sorry.” The delicate tension hanging between them snaps. He covers his mouth. “Sorry.”

It’s just that he’s picturing Felix standing over a casket with a dark and murderous expression, holding a huge red bouquet like some moron just proposed to him at his brother’s funeral. And Rodrigue’s standing solemnly beside him, forced to answer all the polite questions about who the flowers are from: “the kid who got caught making out with my last living son.” 

Felix slips out from under the umbrella and grinds his cigarette butt into the ashtray. He’s looking down, hiding the curve of his own wry smile behind his hair. He’s so fucking beautiful. 

“You should’ve seen Rodrigue’s face,” he says. 

-

You want to know what Sylvain was doing in 2014 instead? Getting into fights. Cheating court-mandated drug tests. Burning professional bridges and disappointing friends with gleeful vindication, because fuck you, if you could happily stomach the good times but you couldn’t stomach this. Studios didn’t want to risk casting him, and when they did, Sylvain showed up late to work every day. The script supervisor hated his guts. The director didn’t care, he was some new hotshot, fresh off a monster-superhero-space-odyssey franchise installment that critics were calling “genre-defining”, and he liked to massage Sylvain’s thigh during meetings. When they inevitably slept together, he left fingerprint bruises all over Sylvain’s hips while Sylvain moaned yeah, yes, loudly over and over. The paps caught the two of them exiting the hotel together. By now the way Sylvain looked after sex was household knowledge. The director went on a public apology tour, pleading for his wife’s forgiveness. Sylvain was fired from set. He didn’t let his publicist say shit. What could anyone say? He’d graduated from directors’ sons to fucking directors themselves? He lost time. An entire November, coked out of his mind. On New Year’s Eve, Ingrid dropped nearly a thousand dollars on a direct flight so she could take Sylvain home from the Victoria’s Secret NYE party and sit on the edge of Sylvain’s expensive bathtub, holding a bottle of blue gatorade and stroking his hair. He threw up for an hour. There was nothing left inside of him. Tequila, smoked salmon and caviar, a gallon of stomach acid, any love he had remaining, all of it just floating there in the toilet water. When he was done, Ingrid grabbed him by the face and made him look at her. “Come back with me to New York,” she said. Her face was wet, which didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t been the one puking until she couldn’t breathe. “Come with me, or you’re going to die, Sylvain.”

Sylvain croaked, “Whatever you say, Arnold Schwarzenegger.” 

Ingrid didn’t seem to get it, but he thought it was a good joke at the time. Sylvain got on a plane the next afternoon, economy class, hungover. After take-off, he threw up again in the bathroom. Waterboarded himself with the suspiciously unbranded mouthwash. Then he slept the whole six hours, head on Ingrid’s shoulder.

-

Ingrid has to travel cross-country to San Francisco for a business meeting, and Sylvain’s name isn’t on the call-sheet that weekend. “Come up to see me,” he cajoles. “We can have some fun.”

He means they can eat, talk, check out the Seattle music scene. Instead, Ingrid wants to hike. 

Sylvain doesn’t start off enthusiastic, but his mind changes as soon as the crisp fresh air fills his lungs. Ingrid picked a tough one. The elevation gain is high and the trail is steep. His calves and inner thighs burn by mile four. He works up a sweat and then the sweat dries and then the cycle repeats. Just one foot in front of the other. Nothing but trees and rocks and meadows of wildflowers, snow-capped mountains in the distance. 

They stop at a particularly nice rock for lunch with a view. “Did the meeting go well?” Sylvain asks around a mouthful of apple. 

Galatea Bread Company began as a small farmers’ market vendor bringing dope-ass ciabatta to low-income communities, but it’s grown more successful over the past fifteen years and some big national bakeries have been circling the waters. Ingrid doesn’t like the idea of being acquired. She thinks it’ll affect the quality of their product and their relationship with their existing customer base. She’s _really_ passionate about bread. Sylvain thinks it has something to do with the fact that she grew up in a food desert until she was nine, and nine is old enough to see injustice and too young to do anything about it yet, so she stored up all that kindling and built her sense of purpose into a bonfire. 

Anyway, he can’t blame her. It’s good fucking bread.

“My father thinks it’s a generous offer,” Ingrid says, munching pensively on some almonds. “He’s right, the money’s good, but—” 

“—but making bread is about more than earning dough,” Sylvain finishes at the same time as Ingrid. 

She glares and throws an almond at him. Sylvain catches it in his mouth and adds, “You’ll make the right choice. Your dad knows it too.”

Ingrid softens up. It’s her turn to ask. “How’s the movie coming along?”

“It’s good,” Sylvain says. He opens his mouth again; Ingrid pitches another almond into it expertly.

“How’s Felix?”

“He’s great,” Sylvain says. 

“Don’t do that,” Ingrid says, and tosses the next almond a little harder. “Answer me for real.”

Sylvain gives her a rueful grin. “I dunno what to tell you, Ingrid. We were good for five months and then bad for five years. Seeing him again doesn’t change anything.”

“You say that as if nothing in the world has ever changed before.” Ingrid waves her hand expressively. “Nobody is sentencing you to feel the same way and repeat the same stuff and be the same person forever in perpetuity.”

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Sylvain says. “I think you should try using a food metaphor.”

“You’re dough. And you think you’re stuck being dough because of the ingredients that went into making you. But dough can also become soft, airy, crusty bread—”

“You’re really doing this,” Sylvain says, impressed. 

Ingrid sighs. “Let’s just finish the trail.”

They’re twin puddles of exhausted muscles by the time they begin the drive back. Still, prolonged exposure to nature does something to a person’s brain: it convinces them that they want to move to a cabin in the Colorado wilderness and grow old living off the majestic earth and let a young deer drink from the cup of their hands and never interact with the shallowness of city life again. Sylvain could grow a mountain man beard. Ingrid could chop wood and wear flannel to her heart’s content. In his fantasy, Felix is there too, pressing his body to Sylvain’s against a tall pine tree, hidden away by the shadows of all the other pine trees.

Then Ingrid says, “Wow,” and when Sylvain sees it too, he pulls off the highway onto the nearest side road. They both get out of the car, transfixed. 

“What do you think, is this a sign from god?” Sylvain asks, helping Ingrid scoot up onto the hood of the car. “Should we kiss?”

“Don’t ruin this for me,” Ingrid says. 

They sit together and watch the red sun go down against a smoldering backdrop of pinks and purples. This happens occasionally, he remembers Leonie explaining. Smoke from Canadian wildfires makes its way down to Washington and sets the sky ablaze. Sometimes you get the right amount of cloud coverage and pollution and dust particles in the air and it all comes together to produce a sunset that could make you cry. 

As the sun disappears, Ingrid rubs Sylvain’s back and says, “I just want you to be happy. That’s all I was trying to say earlier.”

Sylvain can’t respond. He doesn’t know how. The responsibility of keeping someone like him happy may as well be a noose. Ingrid—loyal, brilliant, self-righteous Ingrid—would gladly strangle herself with it. He won’t put that burden on her. The most he can do is hug her outside the airport the next morning and say, “I’ll see you back home.”

-

Three takes of Sylvain seducing Lysithea so far, and it’s clear Edelgard isn’t totally satisfied with any of them. Lysithea brought her A-game today. She’s fierce and cautious and vulnerable, her myriad emotions coiled right under the surface. Next to her, Sylvain is playing junior varsity. 

Between takes three and four, Edelgard comes up to them with notes, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her tone firm and compassionate. She says: that was good. Lysithea, you could go even quieter with that last line. And Sylvain, when you say “I’d like us to be closer,” pull it back. It’s not a threat. You don’t want to hurt or scare her. 

As Edelgard returns to sit behind the monitors, Lysithea suggests, with perfect timing, “Try acting this time.”

“Ouch!” Sylvain says, settling his arm back around her waist. “You’re on fire today.”

The cameras reset. Felix calls roll sound, roll camera, marker. 

Edelgard calls action. They dance around the parlor room, swaying slowly. Lysithea says, quiet and suspicious, “Why are you so interested in me?”

“You’re family,” says Sylvain. 

“You’re a stranger.”

Sylvain takes Lysithea by the chin and lifts her face up. He doesn’t want to hurt or scare her. He thinks he’s found someone who’s like him, who sees the same things in the mirror. He wants her to understand that. “I’d like us to be closer,” he says.

-

When filming ends that day, Felix visits Sylvain’s trailer.

“Do you want to come over?” he asks.

“What?” Sylvain says, tired, hungry, shirtless, and apparently also hallucinating. 

“Today seemed tough for you,” Felix says. “The house I’m renting has a kitchen. I can cook dinner.”

Sylvain doesn’t say, “What?” again. “Sure,” he says instead. “That sounds good.”

Felix hesitates. It’s very obvious the second he registers that Sylvain is in the middle of changing. Same hair-trigger blush as always. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” Sylvain says. 

“Bye,” Felix says, and flees the trailer.

Sylvain puts a shirt on.

-

Dinner smells good. Meat-heavy, because Felix is a total carnivore. “Can I help with anything?” Sylvain asks, hovering, but Felix kicks him out of the kitchen: “Go sit down. Turn yourself off for five seconds.”

Fair enough. Sylvain wanders back into the living room. There’s a speaker dock by the TV, so he plugs his phone in and plays some music, some old-school shit. _Maybe I’m too young to keep good love from going wrong, but tonight you're on my mind..._

The house rental is small, ordinary, everything in shades of white, blue, and gray. The decor elements are all animal-themed: bird trinket dishes, cat throw pillows. The laminate wood flooring could use some tender loving care. Felix has left schedules and script pages and permits and half-empty mugs lying on every surface. Phone chargers everywhere. Muddy boots by the door. A jacket and two different black shirts piled on the couch. 

Sylvain’s nervousness melts off. What was he expecting to find—reporters hiding in the closet? A brick of cocaine? A life-size cardboard cutout of Dimitri? The ghost of Glenn Fraldarius, prepared to give Sylvain the shovel talk?

Ten minutes later, Felix comes out of the kitchen to see a much tidier space. “What are you doing?” 

Sylvain holds up a mug with a horse and the words “home is where the horse is”. “How many ecosystems are you planning to grow in here?”

“Put that down,” Felix says, annoyed.

“C’mon,” Sylvain attempts to placate. “Doesn’t it look better in here now?”

Felix rubs his face. “Can you just—sit down, and stop cleaning up after me. Can you just let me be nice to you?”

Sylvain lets that sink in. He absorbs the smell and sound of meat cooking in the kitchen, the devastating domesticity of Felix’s bare feet and rolled up sleeves. The effort that Felix is making here. You’d think the power of one quick moment five years ago would’ve worn off by now. But Sylvain’s standing here anyway and all he can think about is bread, and the simple necessities of heat, and bacteria, and time.

Fuck, Ingrid’s good.

“I wanna do something nice too,” Sylvain says. “Because, Felix, no offense, looking at this shit physically hurts me.”

“I’ve been busy,” Felix says.

“I see that,” Sylvain says, picking up another dirty mug that reads “stand back, I goat this!” with a goat wearing sunglasses. The woman who owns this house has very clear interests. 

Felix gives up. “Fine, do whatever you want. Food will be ready in five minutes.”

“Cool,” Sylvain says. “You got a broom?”

He sweeps the living room and kitchen floors while Felix finishes making dinner. It’s mostly dust, lint, and dirt and crumbly leaves tracked in from outdoors. A couple strands of long black hair that send a curious pang through Sylvain’s heart just from the sight of them. 

-

“You know who called me last year?” Felix asks later, after they’ve eaten. 

“Who,” Sylvain says, undoing the top two buttons of his short-sleeve shirt. It’s getting late, cooling down outside, but nobody in this state owns any air conditioning so the house stays warm, weighed down. Felix sits across from Sylvain on the ottoman, even though there’s more than enough room for two people on the couch. Maybe he believes that if they get within a foot of each other someone’s going to catch on fire. He could be right.

“Tarantino,” Felix says. “He’s packaging together another Hollywood pastiche film.” 

“I love watching that man jerk off for two hours.”

“He asked me if I wanted to play Rodrigue.”

Sylvain bursts out laughing. “Oh man. Felix, I’m sorry.”

“He wanted to know if I could grow a mustache,” Felix says. “I told him to eat shit.” 

“Call him back right now. Tell him you’ll do it.”

“Fuck off,” Felix says, cracking a smile. He’s gotten more and more relaxed over the past hour. The beer definitely helps. Felix is on his second one. Sylvain’s drinking water, so he has nobody else to blame for why this feels so easy.

“Was I the reason you quit acting?” he asks suddenly.

“What?”

“After we did Bram Stoker together, that was your last real acting credit.”

Felix shrugs, picking at the beer bottle label. “I hated acting before I even met you. I never enjoyed it. I can’t be in front of the camera.”

Sylvain tips his head back to gaze up at the ceiling. “I love it,” he says. Even after everything, all the little body parts this job has carved from him like a mob boss, he really does love it. Isn’t that stupid?

He looks back down, making a pathetic face. “I think it’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“Drop the act,” Felix says. “We both know you can do everything. You speak three languages.”

“Leck mich am Arsch,” Sylvain says. This time Felix barks out a laugh. 

Sylvain officially can’t handle this anymore.

“Hey, c’mere.”

“What do you want,” Felix says.

“Nothing. Will you come over here? I’m not going to attack you.”

Felix sets his beer down on the coffee table and finally sits next to Sylvain. Sylvain lies down, hanging his legs off the couch arm, and then, before he can overthink it, he lowers his head into Felix’s lap. 

Nobody catches on fire. Felix smells so fucking sexy up close. All woody and spicy and clean. Sylvain’s knees would buckle if he wasn’t already horizontal. 

He looks up into Felix’s face. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” Felix says. In an instant his voice has gone rougher and his eyes are wide and dark. His thighs are hot beneath Sylvain’s neck. Above Felix there’s a stretch of ivory white wall and a framed painting of an elk. From the right angle it looks like the elk’s antlers are sprouting from Felix’s head, two curving branches of velvet and bone.

Felix fixes Sylvain’s shirt collar, his hand moving as if he has no control over it. Then it rests against Sylvain’s chest. His thumb runs across one of Sylvain’s open buttons. 

“I wasn’t good at holding onto you,” Sylvain says. “So that’s one thing I’m not good at.”

It’s not raining. It’s not dark inside. Right now he can see Felix clearly, every version. The Felix that never showed up sprouts from the left. The Felix that Sylvain never comforted sprouts from the right. In the center, there’s Felix now, petting Sylvain’s chest to a slow and fixed rhythm as he admits, “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “leck mich am arsch” = “lick me in the ass”  
> [the song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLHcHWDvgfQ)  
> thanks for reading this self-indulgent dumpster fire! thanks for reading anything!


	3. Chapter 3

Ingrid sends Sylvain an entire novel one August morning. The message starts with _I know it’s not our style to say this stuff to each other,_ and ends a paragraph later with _I’m proud of you_.

He texts Ingrid back: _you big flirt_

He calls Mercedes on his way back from the hotel gym. This role doesn’t ask for him to be in incredible shape, the costuming has an early 1960s vibe so the most he ever has to flash is some bicep, but Sylvain never said he wasn’t vain. 

“Hey pretty lady,” he says, when Mercedes picks up.

She laughs her airy tinkling laugh. “Oh, I’ve missed that voice.”

Sylvain met Mercedes at an NA meeting next to the coffee pot and stale pastries. Light blonde hair, light blue eyes, everything about her exuding lightness. Lightness that she’d fought for, tooth and fucking nail. She was three years in recovery. She worked as a counsellor for at-risk youth. “I just did a guest spot on CSI,” Sylvain said, feeling out of depth, but there was no judgment in her face. 

She took him to a cute dessert shop nearby and bought him a far better cup of coffee along with a slice of cake. Sylvain earned more for a single episode than she did in a year, he should’ve been the one paying, but Mercedes insisted, “I’m a big sister at heart. Let me treat you.” They sat next to each other on two stools facing the sunlit floor-to-ceiling windows, and she told him about herself. Her mother’s pill cabinet. Her incarcerated younger brother. The period they spent homeless in a church parking lot. The men who’d come into their lives like demolitionists. 

Next it was Sylvain’s turn. He looked outside and watched the strangers go past, walking their dogs, heading home from work, chatting among a group of friends. There was a poison inside of him that others mistook for gold. The people who didn’t know him wanted a piece of that treasure so badly, they were willing to mine his land until it was barren. The people who did know him couldn’t get away fast enough. 

The little shop emptied out as Mercedes listened. The world had thrown so much bad shit her way. It seemed impossible that she was still standing, let alone turning to smile at Sylvain.

“You’re not very kind to yourself, are you,” she said.

Sylvain tried to laugh it off, wiping his face, his cake all fucking salty.

Months later when he briefly crawled back to coke like an ex-girlfriend and couldn’t face Ingrid’s heartbreak or obligation, he stayed with Mercedes through the week-long depressive crash. “I’ve got you, sweetie,” she said, holding him as each night he woke up drenched in sweat and shaking from vivid dreams about choking on his own blood, or getting castrated, or Miklan morphing into a literal monster and hunting him through their childhood neighborhood, screaming wordlessly. “I’ve got you,” Mercedes soothed, again and again. She saw him cry so many times that week, it stopped being embarrassing.

Work keeps her busy lately, and Sylvain himself is on the cusp of a career comeback, but this phone call stays ritual. 

“So, how should we celebrate?” Mercedes asks.

“We can’t,” Sylvain says mournfully. “I’m in Washington shooting a movie.”

“That’s too bad,” Mercedes hums. “You know, I’ve never been to that part of the country.”

“I think you’d like it,” Sylvain says. He can imagine Mercedes picnicing on the beach, or sitting in a canoe, not lifting a single finger, as Sylvain manfully rows them around a lake filled with water lilies.

He gets in the hotel elevator and glimpses his face in the reflective doors. He rubs his jaw idly. This role does ask him to be clean-shaven. It catches Sylvain off-guard sometimes, the whole aging process. When you grow up in the public eye, all anyone remembers is your baby face. Moms still approach him occasionally to gush about how much they loved him in _My Deadbeat Dad Got Reincarnated As My Dog_. The person you were when you were young follows you around everywhere. 

“We’ll celebrate once you’re back in town, then,” Mercedes is saying. “Happy birthday, Sylvain.”

-

There’s a small, dark green aloe vera plant waiting for Sylvain in his trailer, accompanied by a handwritten note: “Sylvain - water once a week. Place in direct sunlight. Treat it well and it will flower. Congratulations - D.” 

It is impossible to outdo Dorothea at gift-giving. Last year she sent Sylvain a bronze replica of a Rodin sculpture. It sits in his New York apartment, his favorite thing on that bookshelf: two hands, suspended in motion, frozen in the moment when they are just about to intertwine. But a month ago, genius struck, and Sylvain scoured eBay until he found an old _Officers Academy_ playbill starring the original cast.

He slides it over to Manuela now as they’re caffeinating at craft services, waiting for Ferdinand and his team to light the set.

“My agent Dorothea is a big fan,” Sylvain says. This was the first truly personal detail he learned about her. She grew up right in L.A., amidst the glitz and wealth, listening to Broadway recordings at the public library, watching award shows on the small TV set in her group home. “Could you help me out?”

“It’d be my pleasure,” Manuela says. She takes the playbill and signs it with a flourish.

This is it, Sylvain thinks happily. Dorothea is going to shit.

As Manuela pens a personal inscription, Sylvain pours himself some coffee. He sees Felix coming and skips the sugar. 

“We’re starting camera rehearsal in five minutes,” Felix says, taking the coffee cup instinctually when Sylvain hands it over. “Did you go to hair and makeup?”

“Yeah, Annette prettied me up,” Sylvain says. “You can’t tell?”

That’s bait and Felix knows it. “Where’s Bernadetta?”

Out in the garden. The stretch of rain ended earlier this week. After too long, even Bernadetta needs fresh air and Vitamin D. She’s more present here than she was on _L.A., Je Suis Hell On Earth_. Edelgard prefers having Bernadetta nearby to provide input. This scene they’re about to shoot has already gone through a couple of rewrites. Earlier versions were a bit toothless. Now Lysithea encounters Manuela and Sylvain on their way back from playing tennis, and Sylvain is wearing her father’s clothes. The all-white outfit fits loosely by design, to make Sylvain look more boyish. He’ll wear the same thing later on when Lysithea stabs him through the chest with a pair of gardening shears. 

Felix gives Sylvain his coffee back, half-finished. Something stops him before he turns to go. He reaches up to brush away the curl of hair that’s been gradually falling into Sylvain’s eyes.

“Five minutes,” he says again. Then he’s off. 

Sylvain feels winded like he just ran a marathon. Did they even say five sentences to each other? Manuela looks at him with a raised eyebrow. If Sylvain were anybody else, he might’ve blushed.

“Ah, youth,” Manuela says wistfully as she returns the playbill. It reads: “To the lovely Dorothea - sing out.”

“It’s not like that,” Sylvain says, a good-natured deflection. 

“Oh?” Manuela says. “What is it like?”

-

He crashed on Felix’s couch that other night. Didn’t mean to, it just happened. One second Felix was stroking up and down his ribs, the next second the gray daylight was coming in through the living room curtains. There was a pillow under his head and a blanket tucked around his body, patterned with little white rabbits. He was too tall for the couch, so his feet were hanging off the edge. His shoes had been removed. The rest of his clothes were creased from sleeping. The cushions smelled like Felix, but there was some of Sylvain in there now too. He could hear the refrigerator’s electric hum. Noisy birds outside. Down the hallway, Felix slept behind a door left slightly ajar. 

What was it like? Did a word exist to express the combined feeling of peace and dread? Some poet somewhere must’ve already found a way to describe how contentment sometimes feels like a trap. It didn’t sound like Felix was awake yet, so Sylvain lay there as still and quiet as possible, as if the moment was spun sugar in his hand, and if he held it too tightly it’d break or dissolve. 

-

With only a few weeks left of production, Edelgard buys everyone tickets to the upcoming Mariners game, because while she couldn’t care less about baseball, she’d like it if her cast and crew didn’t lose their collective minds from 14-hour shooting days in a claustrophobic gothic mansion. 

Sylvain stretches luxuriously like a big cat, his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. In the next row down, Petra their stunt coordinator, who doesn’t know a thing about baseball, has found herself the very worst teacher. Ferdinand calls the runs “goals”. He’s enthusiastically wearing a jersey anyway.

“Are you having fun?” Sylvain asks Felix.

Felix’s sunglasses cover half of his face, but what’s visible looks mellowed out. “Are you? You’re the one who brought reading material.”

A printed copy of Bernadetta’s novel draft sits in Sylvain’s lap. He loves the feeling of something physical. Bernadetta’s twitchy about it, though, so instead of her name and the working title, Sylvain made a cover that just says “PORN”.

It’s 300 pages about seven generations of a single family, each cursed in its own way with premature death and reclusiveness and broken ambition. There’s also some magical realism involving carnivorous plants. Sylvain reads between innings, enjoying the lively atmosphere, the background noise of the game. It’s a nice day out. Even Felix is getting into it. Occasionally when something exciting happens he leans forward attentively, which makes Sylvain grin.

“I didn’t take you for a baseball fan.”

“I’m not,” Felix says. “The pace is too slow.”

“It’s okay to slow down once in awhile,” Sylvain says. “Smell the roses and stale beer.”

“You can’t seriously like this.”

“What’s not to like? Baseball’s timeless.” 

“It’s anticipation without action. I’m watching carpet get installed.”

“Go ahead and talk shit but I know you’d love being in a batting cage, Felix. I’ll take you someday. Let you whack the shit out of some balls.”

Felix’s mouth twitches. “Did you play Little League or something?”

“Are you thinking about me in a baseball uniform?” Sylvain teases. “Nah. But my dad used to take us to Red Sox games.”

There’s a picture in a house somewhere of Sylvain at the ballpark, his hand swimming inside a baseball glove. He’s smiling as Miklan lifts him up to sit on his shoulders. A baby tooth is missing, so he must’ve been at least 5 or 6 years old. If Sylvain thinks about it for long enough he starts to recall the feeling of the worn leather of the glove, and Miklan’s grip on his knobby knees, holding him steady, but this could just be his brain fooling itself. Someone should tell Petra that’s all baseball really is: nostalgia for something that may have never existed. 

The only time Felix ever asked about Sylvain’s emancipation was on set in London. What nobody tells you about filmmaking is that sometimes it’s mind-numbingly boring. They spent hours just sitting around in their stuffy 1870s period costumes, sharing the same pair of anachronistic headphones. Rodrigue must’ve just walked by, because Felix took out his earbud and asked, “Do you still talk to your parents?”

Sylvain wired them money semi-regularly, out of some twisted sense of duty. Face-to-face interactions averaged out to be around twice per year. He was older now than Miklan had been when it all started. He’d imagined that age would bring greater clarity, but it turned out Sylvain felt the same way about it that he always had—this dark, empty pit of sadness and pity. He didn’t know how to explain any of it to Felix, who at the time adored his brother fiercely and without complication. So he told Felix about this clan of spotted hyenas in the Serengeti where the mothers often produce twins. The pair of cubs will attack one another from the moment they leave the womb, sometimes before they’ve both even drawn their first breath. They bite and throttle each other until one of them, usually the younger pup, dies from their wounds or of starvation. Fighting for their mother’s milk. Fighting for a scrap of love. 

Sylvain wonders if Felix even remembers that conversation. 

Maybe he does. Felix places his hand on his own knee, palm facing up. Behind his sunglasses, his expression has gone quietly focused. 

Sylvain threads his fingers through Felix’s loosely, and sits back to watch the game. The smell of hotdogs and popcorn is heavy in the air. The sky is cloudy but there’s a pocket of sun that occasionally lights up the green turf.

-

They hit another break between innings, which should be enough time for Sylvain to read the rest of this chapter. He doesn’t look up until he hears Felix mutter, “Fuck me.”

Then he sees their faces blown up on the Jumbotron’s kiss cam.

The crowd spikes in volume—some gasps, some applause. Sylvain’s been recognized. He pastes on a smile and waves. He barely registers what the booming announcer’s saying. Look who we have in the stands today, folks. Give us a kiss, will ya? 

Felix looks _pissed_ , radiating discomfort, sinking lower into his seat. The row below is visible on the giant video board too, a slider scale of faces ranging from slightly amused (Ferdinand) to extremely unamused (Hubert, who evidently has enough of a corporeal form to show up on camera). 

When nobody makes any move to kiss anyone else, the stadium grows even rowdier.

Fuck it. Sylvain takes his baseball cap off, puts it back on backwards. He leans down—does some quick math about who among this lineup is least likely to kill him—and picks the golden retriever, planting a big wet kiss against Ferdinand’s temple. 

The reaction is mostly loud cheering, laughter. It’s Seattle. Nobody cares. The camera cuts over to an older couple in their 60s next, who smooch obligingly.

“Sorry, buddy,” Sylvain says.

Ferdinand twists around to make bashful eye contact. “It was no trouble.”

“Sylvain,” Felix interrupts, which is how Sylvain notices he’s gripping Felix so tight the veins are visible across the back of his hand. 

“Shit,” Sylvain says, rattled. He releases Felix’s hand, avoids Felix’s penetrating gaze. Flexes his own hand a couple times until the feeling passes.

-

It’s funny how fast things change. Disney stars come out. The golden age of paparazzi is over. Same-sex marriage passes. In most places now Sylvain can go out and nobody gives a shit. The journalist who interviews Sylvain for GQ, Ashe Ubert, asks him about it as he’s touring the interior of Sylvain’s apartment with a humanistic sort of curiosity. He asks whether Sylvain thinks things would’ve happened differently if they’d happened just a few years later.

“I could drown myself in hypotheticals,” Sylvain says. “But there’s a lot of reasons I went off the rails. A lot of them were self-inflicted.”

Ashe has found the Rodin. His eyes fix onto the bronzed hands. Sylvain figures he’ll get a question about it later. For now Ashe appears to still be thinking about the last thing Sylvain said.

“But you faced a great deal of public scrutiny too.”

“I mean, sure,” Sylvain says. “There’s a part of me that’s still angry.”

“Is that where the motivation to do _American Stoner_ came from? That role was pretty pointed.”

“Who doesn’t want to play their worst nightmare version of themselves? I get to bring this person to life, this shitty guy who’s everything other people have ever thought about me and everything I’ve ever thought about myself. And then at the end of the day the movie’s over. At the end of the day I get to kill him.”

Ashe’s profile on Sylvain comes out a month later. He writes:

> The narrative around Sylvain Gautier is that he squandered away a tremendous potential for greatness. He spent some of the most formative years of his life captivating millions with his talent, good looks, and unconquerable personality, until he flamed out before our very eyes. 
> 
> I meet Gautier for dinner in his urbane Manhattan apartment. It’s my first celebrity profile where the celebrity has insisted on cooking for me. He lets me snoop around as he poaches a fish. When I ask about the reproduction of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture _The Cathedral_ sitting in his living room, Gautier says, “I dare you to find me anyone better at capturing the physicality of human desire.” Then he makes a jerking-off motion as if he’s sick of hearing himself talk. In person, he’s both more charming and more normal than I’d expected. At times he comes across like one of the characters he used to play in the 2000s, likable and precocious and too self-aware by half. 
> 
> He serves me dinner and easygoing conversation as I burn through the questions I prepared. Does he prefer New York to L.A.? Definitely, he says. L.A. traffic drives him nuts. What’s his relationship with acting like, after all these years? He says he’s happy when he’s doing his job, but he has hang-ups about the whole phenomenon of being looked at by other people. His goal now is to be a little more oblivious to it.
> 
> Gautier has a tendency to speak around things, revealing just enough for you to believe that he’s allowed you a meaningful degree of closeness. He apologizes at one point: “Sorry, I haven’t done press in a while.” The possibility occurs to me that Gautier didn’t squander anything. After years of performing his life for our pleasure, maybe he’s just chosen to hoard away his ineffable star quality and find a way to live with himself first. 

-

“What if we go to a _different_ dive bar this time?” suggests Sylvain, like some kind of heretic.

“But we love Fódlan’s Deep Throat,” Annette gasps.

“But _what if_ ,” he says, “this town has more to offer than Fódlan’s Deep Throat?”

“I can’t even fathom such a place,” Annette says, shielding Sylvain’s eyes from a mist of hairspray. 

Ten hours later they’re doing karaoke night at a tiki bar. It’s campy, cheerful, and imbued with a fun sort of chaos. Annette looks like she’s having the time of her life. She dances to Ferdinand’s ardently committed Prince cover that’s way outside his natural register. She belts along with Manuela’s operatic Kate Bush. At one point she vanishes, only to return wielding a drink that contains a paper umbrella, a purple flower, a neon straw, and an entire banana “garnish” shaped like a dolphin. “Do you wanna try this?” she asks Felix. Felix leans over without batting an eyelash and takes a sip. His nose bumps against the dolphin’s. This woman is some kind of magic.

“Are you gonna sing anything?” Sylvain ask-shouts into Annette’s ear. 

Annette shakes her head emphatically. Her gaze darts to the stage, where Caspar and Raphael are now yelling to the Violent Femmes at a deafening decibel.

“You should do it,” Felix says. “You’re good. Everyone’s heard you.”

He’s referring to the way Annette hums along to her playlists while she works. She has at least two dozen, each one lovingly curated. Sylvain’s in his own head and needs a distraction? “Wham! Bam! Grand Slam Jams.” Lysithea’s being intense and needs to chill out? “Cool Tunes for Ingenues.” 

Annette glares. “Felix!” 

“What? It was a compliment—”

Obviously another approach is required here.

“Annie, beautiful Annette,” Sylvain drapes a friendly arm around her shoulders, “this is an opportunity. Think of it as a self-improvement exercise. And if you go up now, the only act you’ll have to follow is the dynamic duo over there.”

“Ugh.” Annette slams the rest of her banana dolphin drink. “I hate you both.”

She stomps off to put her name and song request on the list. Later when she takes the stage, Sylvain hollers, “We love you, Annie!”

Felix isn’t lying: Annette has a nice voice. It’s sweet and clear. There’s an emotional sincerity about her that’s catnip to Felix. She’s the type of person that Felix likes, even if he doesn’t know this about himself. Felix can act as prickly as he wants, but at the end of the day he likes standing in the light.

Sylvain watches Felix listening to the music, aglow under the colorful tiki lanterns. Is he really going to do this? Is he really ready to do this all over again?

Felix glances over. “She’s good,” he says, looking pleased.

Yeah, guess so.

-

Nights like these, Sylvain gets to be designated driver. He’s fine with it. He likes getting people home safe. Annette’s hotel is closest, so he and Felix drop her off first and get tipped in sloppy goodbye kisses on the cheek. From there, the drive to Felix’s house is dark and woody. Felix looks sleepy in the passenger seat. After five more minutes pass, he rests his head against the window. The reflection of his profile is superimposed over the blurry trees outside. Sylvain is about to ruin this.

“I gotta ask you something,” Sylvain says. He keeps his eyes on the road.

Felix makes a noise to indicate he’s paying attention.

“Are you seeing anyone right now?” Sylvain asks. “Because if you are, I’ll back off. Even if you aren’t, you can tell me to back off.”

There’s a long stretch of silence. Felix sits up straight. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

“Okay,” Sylvain says. “I thought maybe, you and Dimitri.”

Surprisingly Felix doesn’t immediately lash out at the implication. It can be a coinflip, whenever the subject turns to Felix’s family history. What form will his loss inhabit today: something ferocious and wild, or domesticated by time?

The animal tonight is old, tamed. Felix exhales with a touch of frustration and rubs an eye and repeats, almost to himself, “Me and Dimitri.”

-

The Fraldariuses used to spend summers in Italy at the Blaiddyds’ vacation lakehouse. As Lambert prepared them a late breakfast and Rodrigue abandoned his screenplay to play cards with Patricia, Glenn would teach Felix and Dimitri to swim. Dimitri always got to go first. Glenn held him by the waist and showed him how to move his arms and kick his legs in unison. Every few strokes Glenn said, “Breathe,” and Dimitri lifted his head up. Glenn said, “Swim,” and Dimitri trustingly submerged himself again. “When is it my turn,” Felix complained, sitting on the dock, kicking his feet through the water, and Glenn smirked: “Oh I’ll get to you, little man.” 

When they weren’t swimming, they were biking through town along the waterfront, or watching Glenn chat up local girls, or stuffing themselves on the abundance of fresh tomatoes, or slipping past the adults drinking wine on the veranda. Felix has few other memories of his early childhood. In each surviving snapshot lives the same catalogue of faces. 

The death of his parents drags Dimitri underwater. Glenn’s passing carries him out to sea.

Dimitri spends two weeks in the hospital and another month in a physical rehabilitation facility. In this timespan, Felix 1) ruthlessly bisects himself from public life, 2) nearly gets into a physical altercation with a photographer, and 3) unknowingly lies to Dimitri’s face during one of his almost daily visits when he says, “Get some rest. I’ll stay with you.” 

Dimitri is the more honest person. At the time he is exhausted from another crying jag, and he doesn’t promise Felix anything in return.

Rodrigue brings them back to Italy the following summer. Perhaps Dimitri needs a way to feel closer to the people he’s lost, he says. Perhaps the memories will bring some closure.

Jetlagged and sleepless upon arrival, Felix goes out on the private boat dock. In the dark the lake looks bottomless. He sits there until it becomes too chilly to sit there any longer. Then he returns. This is the night Felix learns Dimitri screams in his sleep. 

Dimitri’s pain is all-consuming. He pines for the dead with such intensity that the passage of time is powerless against it. Somedays Dimitri has convinced himself that he saw his father in the street. Somedays Dimitri will not eat. Somedays Dimitri is so bitterly jealous and hateful it makes Felix hateful too. Felix can admit it now—that summer, he is not generous. He’s angry in a way he can’t fully process, and when he gets in Dimitri’s uncomprehending face and snarls, “ _Snap out of it,_ ” his own face feels hot. Something inside of him has shifted fundamentally. All the furniture has been rearranged. His brother is gone. Felix is going to spend the rest of his life recontextualizing who he is without him. The only known quantity he has left is Dimitri and Dimitri would take that from him too. 

Dimitri’s pain blankets the entire lakehouse. It fills every crevice in the walls. There’s no space left for anything else. Dimitri can’t manage anyone else’s pain, and Rodrigue can only manage Dimitri’s, so Felix has to get out of this fucking place. 

He goes back to L.A. because he doesn’t know where else to go. Those six months are the most lost he’s ever felt. He cuts worthless TV promos for NBC. He grinds his way up the ladder without his family name. The grief hits him full force, as if this whole time it’s just been lying in wait beneath Dimitri’s shadow, slowly carving a canyon through Felix’s fucking soul. The fact of Glenn’s death descends upon him in arbitrary waves, whenever he notices a stranger with a specific shade of hair. He sees tomatoes ripened on the vine and suddenly his body’s betraying himself in the middle of a grocery store. Little things are capable of knocking him to the ground. Days that are too sunny. A sky that’s too blue.

At the end of that half-year, Rodrigue has a heart attack.

Felix arrives at the hospital thirteen hours after receiving the phone call. He takes a cab straight from the airport. By then he’s already been updated that Rodrigue is expected to make a full recovery. It’s past midnight. Rodrigue is resting. Dimitri sits by the bed. He’s six foot two and looks horribly small. Felix drops into the chair beside him without a word. 

Dimitri says, low and hoarse, “Felix, I—”

“Shut up.” Felix closes his eyes briefly. That is not how he meant to say it. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Thank you for coming,” Dimitri says anyway. 

“Sorry I was late,” Felix says. He doesn’t leave again.

If Sylvain wants to know about “Felix and Dimitri”, it’s simply this: some children will lift their heads out of the water but forget to actually inhale. In the beginning you have to keep reminding them. Keep doing it even past the point you believe they’re ready. Felix takes up this task for Dimitri and, sometimes, for himself. Now breathe. Now swim.

-

Felix has stopped talking. Sylvain pulls into the driveway of Felix’s house and puts the car in park. Condensation collects on the windows. The temperature is warm inside the car.

Felix is staring outside. “It’s strange, how I met you and lost Glenn in the same year. I think about that sometimes.”

Sylvain doesn’t respond yet. If Felix has gotten better at talking about the stuff going on in his head, Sylvain has also learned how to better endure and wait.

“All this shit happens when we’re young that changes us,” Felix says, his voice distant. “We don’t even know it’s happening until afterwards.”

“I know the feeling,” Sylvain says. 

Felix drags in a long, slow breath. He lets it out and finally turns to meet Sylvain’s gaze. 

“I don’t want you to back off,” he says. “I won’t either. I’m tired of it.”

Sylvain smiles. Takes one good look at Felix’s unwavering face and knows he’s doomed. “You know, it was my birthday last week.”

“No it wasn’t,” Felix says reflexively. 

“Two years clean and sober.”

For a moment Felix’s brows knit together. Then his features relax. “Good for you. I mean that.”

“Thanks,” Sylvain says. He cracks his knuckles. “Alright, I’m gonna kiss you now.”

Felix just gives him a flat, affectionate look.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sylvain murmurs. “All anticipation, no action.” 

He works up to it by touching Felix’s face first. Felix shifts closer, putting himself within reach. Sylvain swipes his thumb across Felix’s cheekbone and watches the way Felix’s lips part. His heart is beating quickly. His body is on the edge of some kind of fight-or-flight response. Stop, he argues with himself. There’s nobody else here. It’s just Felix, who isn’t the same person he was, but then again Sylvain isn’t either. And yet what are the odds this still feels the same anyway?

Then they’re kissing, slow and deep. Felix’s mouth is soft and open, his tongue gliding against Sylvain’s. Would you look at that. Someone’s gotten more forward. Sylvain laughs against Felix’s mouth, a rough shock of sound, and cups Felix’s face in both hands. He kisses back hot and messy until he can feel Felix panting quietly, and even then they just keep kissing and kissing in the car, where the only ones watching are the empty house and the trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess this is a 4-parter now?! thanks always for reading
> 
> [the sculpture](http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/collections/sculptures/cathedral)   
>  [annie's karaoke song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bkyBpmksdk)   
> 


	4. Chapter 4

Edelgard runs a tight ship. Early on Sylvain promised her his best behavior. He’s worked in this industry for almost twenty years. He’s a professional. You know what’s unprofessional? Fraternizing with your AD.

Sylvain brings this up as Felix is straddling his lap, running fingers through his hair and mouthing along his jaw. “Whatever,” is Felix’s succinct response.

Sylvain tugs Felix’s hips closer. “And don’t get me started on the iffy power dynamics here. Talk about inappropriate.”

“Why do I like you,” Felix mutters to himself. 

“You run the whole set,” Sylvain keeps going. “You’re practically my boss.”

Felix backs off, looks down at Sylvain with a mix of impatience and confusion. Then he buys a clue. His thighs tighten around Sylvain’s waist and he pulls sharply on Sylvain’s hair, making him arch his back. “So be good,” Felix says, and Sylvain almost purrs.

They haven’t fucked yet. All things considered they don’t even fool around that much. Somedays, like today, Felix comes into Sylvain’s trailer all revved up and Sylvain’s more than happy to help him out. Other days Felix sits on the couch and spends the entire short time reviewing tomorrow’s prelim call-sheet as Sylvain looks over his own sides. Sylvain knows they’re honeymooning but, shit, is that so bad? Felix’s playful little growl in his ear, or even just his feet in Sylvain’s lap as they read together. Sylvain is allowed to enjoy this, right?

-

In the lead-up to Sylvain’s climactic “death”, they run through multiple stunt rehearsals with Petra. They start off-set, staging the choreography: it begins in the parlor room, as Lysithea smashes Sylvain over the head with a glass paperweight and attempts to tie him up while he’s unconscious. But he wakes up too soon, gets his hands on the iron fireplace poker, and runs it through Lysithea’s leg. She limps outside. He stalks after her, face bloody, coldly furious at the betrayal. Saying, “You didn’t leave, did you? No, you don’t want to leave me.”

In the end she lures him into the garden. Boom. Garden shears through the chest.

“Like this,” Petra demonstrates for Lysithea, pressing the prop shears against Sylvain’s ribs—the first shallow stab, then the second unyielding push forward.

Call time is six in the morning on the actual day. Edelgard’s perfectionism has been dialed up to 110. Ferdinand wants to shoot with the detuned Primo lenses and has prepared a treatise explaining why. All the while Caspar’s stuck between them with a camera dolly taller than himself like some kid in the middle of a custody battle. The pressure is getting to everyone. They’ll be lucky if Felix doesn’t decapitate somebody with his clipboard.

Then it’s game on. For the remainder of daylight hours, Sylvain and Lysithea chase and hurt and try to destroy each other. 

During their lunch break, he sits with her in his bloodied white tennis outfit and asks, “How’re you holding up?” 

“I’m getting good mileage out of my stage combat class,” Lysithea says with an undertone of irony. She only just graduated from Julliard last year, but the signs are clear: Lysithea’s a gutsy performer, a once-in-a-generation chameleon. The type of actress that audiences will notice. Edelgard herself has really taken a liking to her. 

“Everything’s gonna change for you soon. Get ready to be a Known Person.”

Lysithea pulls a face. “I can’t think about the future like that. Fastest way to take the present for granted.”

Talking to her always reminds Sylvain of talking to someone else. Sylvain smiles. “I don’t really have any good advice to give you anyway.”

“You’d be the first,” Lysithea says archly.

Movie people are full of wisdom they love to throw around for free. Lose 10 pounds. Do a Holocaust film. There’s even some stuff Sylvain would like to tell himself, if time travel was an option. Hey, little buddy—when someone hands you a drink when you’re 14. When people start calling you a sex symbol. When people start calling you an addict and a fairy and a slut. When a married director invites you to his hotel room. Turn your back on that shit. Stop running into the knife just to show off the wound. 

The final time Lysithea stabs him, Sylvain grabs her by the wrist and helps her on the second push. This is right. He wants this. A flicker of shock and regret crosses Lysithea’s face, before her expression morphs into conviction. 

Edelgard calls cut, sounding satisfied.

The center of Sylvain’s chest hurts from all the repeated blunt pressure. He’s so emotionally exhausted that the vision of Felix fully clothed, in front of all their coworkers, giving Sylvain a towel so he can wipe the fake syrupy blood off his face, is the sexiest thing he’s ever experienced. “Thanks,” Sylvain says, and scrubs his face against the towel until his skin feels raw and clean and reborn.

-

The final scene is set a couple years after the other events of the film. A single uninterrupted low-angle shot, no dialogue. Lysithea’s makeup has been done to make her appear older, and it’s the only time in the movie she’ll wear her hair up. Her dress is black. A bush of thorny red roses has grown atop the soil where she buried her uncle. Lysithea waters the roots evenly, and then walks back inside the mansion to join her mother. She allows the darkness a small place in her home. It fertilizes new greenery and growth. 

Lysithea nails it on the first take. Edelgard asks for two more. Then she says: “That’s a wrap on _A Little Plague._ ”

Edelgard sounds affected. She’s not the only one. Bernadetta stands off to the side with her hands clasped against her chest, looking overwhelmed. All of her writing is personal, that’s often why it’s good, but this script came from a place she’s never shown Sylvain.

That doesn’t mean Sylvain can’t recognize the familiar landscape. It’s inside him too. He offers out an arm to her. Bernadetta scoots closer and lets herself be hugged, sniffling against Sylvain’s shirt.

It sets off a chain reaction and soon everyone’s hugging. 

Leonie’s first. “I’m glad we met,” she says. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Sylvain feels oddly touched. “Aw, Leonie. Bring it in.”

Raphael turns it into a big group pile, his thick arms squeezing Sylvain’s organs into pulp.

Sylvain smooches Ferdinand again, makes five seconds of unbroken eye contact with Hubert, ruffles Annette’s hair, exchanges bro-hugs with Caspar (reciprocated gamely) and Linhardt (limply). With Edelgard, he just extends his hand. 

“Thanks for giving me a chance,” he tells her.

Edelgard shakes his hand, but pulls him closer so she can hug him too. “You didn’t let me down,” she says.

-

Byleth Eisner rents out the observatory of the tallest building in Seattle for the wrap party. 73rd floor, which Hubert does not look happy about, but Ferdinand keeps him distracted with a steady supply of canapés. At any given time Hubert is sinisterly balancing three different types of puff pastry.

It turns out Edelgard’s crew all went to film school together and that’s why they’re so tight. “I’ll never forget her first-year student project,” Caspar says as he’s delivering drive-by shots. “It was like, fuck organized religion, fuck capitalism, and fuck you too.”

“Caspar,” Edelgard chides, then to Sylvain: “He’s exaggerating. It was only a fifteen-minute film. There wasn’t enough time to address capitalism.”

A different side of Edelgard is visible now that production has ended. Less burden living inside her posture. Greater willingness to talk about herself and do shots of fireball. She did eight years of Catholic school, and the experience left a bad taste in her mouth. There was too much guilt and emotional scarification. She was just a child but she was convinced she was going to hell.

Sylvain thinks, _a-ha_. Last year, Dorothea’d advised coyly: “Don’t mention _Eastertide_ to Edie unless you want to derail the entire conversation.” All this time Sylvain’d assumed that Edelgard wasn’t a fan of his performance, but now he’d bet money that her issue is with Rhea’s directorial style. Which is, as once described by New York Magazine, “marked simultaneously by brutal violence and religious propaganda.” 

“That’s why I’m fascinated by horror,” Edelgard continues. “It’s a vessel for exploring unacceptable fears and urges. When it’s done well, it can be very cathartic.”

“Your church movie scared the shit out of me,” Sylvain admits.

Edelgard knocks back her shot, grimacing. “Producers were scared of me too. Bernadetta and I must’ve spent a whole year trying to pitch _A Little Plague_. And then when Randolph had to leave, I thought it was a horrible omen.”

“Oh yeah, the guy Felix replaced?”

“Yes, we were lucky Dimitri reached out. He’d heard we were hunting for an AD last minute and told us Felix was interested in the project.”

“Huh,” Sylvain says.

His attention floats back towards Felix. Ten minutes ago he was talking to Annette. Right now he’s alone, sitting on the ledge of one of the giant observation windows.

The feeling of déjà vu is undeniable. Sylvain winks at Edelgard and excuses himself. 

His reflection joins Felix’s in the glass as he sits on the opposite corner of the ledge. It’s a large enough window that there’s still over a foot of space between them, if they both behave. The whole dark city is laid out below, the mountain range of tall buildings, the streets lit yellow by cars, distant boats in the indigo water. 

The party rages on. Felix dressed nicely for the occasion. Sylvain briefly entertains the notion of peeling Felix’s nice pants off with his teeth.

“You’re in a good mood,” Felix speaks up first. 

Sylvain grins. “This was a fun set. I had a good time this summer. Didn’t you?”

“It wasn’t bad,” Felix acknowledges.

“Got anything lined up after this?”

Dimitri recently signed Claude’s medieval fantasy pet project, Felix tells him. Principal photography starts in November. It’s another chance for Claude to rip apart an entire genre. This time the bad guy is the assumed rightness of hereditary monarchy. Dimitri has high hopes that general audiences might really “get” this one. 

“Good ol’ Dimitri,” Sylvain says, “allergic to Hollywood cynicism.”

“Allergic to turning a profit,” Felix says, but not meanly. “What about you?”

Sylvain pounces on the opportunity. “The weirdest thing happened. Soderbergh reached out.”

“Don’t fucking start this up again—”

“He wants to remake the 1988 cinematic masterpiece, _Cocktail_ —”

“You’re an idiot,” Felix says, smirking.

For once in his life there’s no good reason not to touch Felix. Felix’s leg is right there, stretched out across the ledge, and they’re both temporarily out of a job. Sylvain wraps his palm around Felix’s ankle. He skims his hand up towards the back of Felix’s knee. Felix’s calf muscle twitches. His eyes reflect light. 

Sylvain says, “Edelgard told me something interesting.”

He rolls the question around in his mouth. Hey, did you do this movie _because_ I was in it, and not despite the fact?

Felix waits tolerantly, holding still. Sylvain can’t bring himself to do it. It’s asking too much.

“Never mind. Do you wanna head out early? Go for a walk or something?”

“Or a drive,” Felix says.

“Sure,” Sylvain says. “Where do you wanna go?”

Felix leans back against the windowsill and says, “Your hotel room.”

Sylvain lets go of Felix’s leg and makes a big show of stretching. Mostly for his own benefit, because his pulse just spiked like a motherfucker. “Uh huh. Let’s go there right now.”

-

Between Felix slamming Sylvain against the hotel room wall, and Sylvain forgetting all the muscle memory involved in taking his own shirt off, Sylvain manages to say, “Just so you know, it’s been awhile for me. Since the last time I, you know.”

Felix continues mauling Sylvain’s throat. “Had sex? Finished a sentence?”

“Hey, cut me some slack.”

“Sorry,” Felix says grudgingly. He backs off, wipes his mouth. “Do you want to stop?”

Sylvain recalls that you take shirts off by unbuttoning them. He gives it a shot. “That’s really not what I said.”

“You didn’t say anything,” Felix retorts. “I can’t read your mind.”

Shirt off, good riddance, Sylvain hauls Felix back in for a kiss. He gets his tongue in Felix’s mouth, slides a knee between Felix’s thighs. Both of Felix’s instinctive reactions—to bite, and then to melt—make Sylvain feel body-slammed by arousal. 

Has it been a year? Almost a year since Sylvain figured it was worth a try to stop having sad fucked-up sex, and then once that was off the table he quickly discovered he didn’t really know how to have any other type of sex. But he doesn’t feel sad or fucked up about what’s happening right now. Mostly he feels insanely, viscerally turned on. Like there’s a disease in his brain and if he doesn’t touch Felix he’ll die. He tries to get Felix’s pants off but Felix won’t give him the space, so he grabs Felix’s ass instead, helping Felix grind against him. Felix’s erection drags against his leg. The heat of it is going to burn Sylvain alive. 

Felix doesn’t budge except to finally unzip Sylvain’s pants and push down his boxer briefs. His cock strains against his stomach. The band of his underwear pulls tight below his balls. Sylvain lets out a ragged breath. 

“The bed’s right there,” he says.

“Whenever I thought about us, it was like this,” Felix mutters. He’s staring down at Sylvain’s cock with this intent, half-dazed look.

“Yeah,” Sylvain says, strangled. “Anything you want, sweetheart.”

Felix licks his palm. It’s still pretty dry, but Sylvain’s leaking enough to make up for it.

Sylvain paws uselessly at Felix’s fly again, he wants to have some fun too, but Felix keeps him pinned to the wall and jacks him off like he’s on a mission. The most Sylvain can do is thrust jerkily into Felix’s grip and let Felix explore. It isn’t just Felix’s hand, it’s the way he’s determinedly watching for Sylvain’s reactions to every stroke, every rub against the tip of his cock. Sylvain’s head thunks back against the wall. The muscles in his stomach feel hot, tight. He wants this to last but there’s no way. 

“Baby,” he gasps. “Wait, slow down, I’m gonna come.”

Felix doesn’t let up. His eyes track from Sylvain’s face all the way down to Sylvain’s cock pumping through his fist. He swallows visibly. “It’ll take the edge off. We can go again.”

Sylvain shivers. He’s going to fall apart for a fucking handjob. At least Felix looks like he’s right there with him, skin flushed wildly. He’s still humping his dick against Sylvain’s thigh. Sylvain can’t tell if Felix even knows he’s doing it. If Felix could hear the noises coming out of his mouth, he’d cut his own tongue off. 

Sylvain comes like a teenager. He gets it everywhere, Felix’s hand, Felix’s shirt, his own dry clean-only pants. When Felix eases off, Sylvain sags against the wall. He chokes out a laugh, amazed by Felix, by himself, by the exhilarating potential of sex feeling really fucking good. 

-

They eventually make it to the bed. Sylvain lasts longer the second round. Gets to show Felix what he can really do. He puts Felix in his lap and fucks into him deep and unhurried, and the whole time Felix squirms and tries to ride him faster. “Easy,” Sylvain murmurs, wrapping long dark hair around his hand, giving it a tug. Felix moans. He’s pink all the way down his chest. His cock drools messily against his own stomach as Sylvain rolls his hips up and pulls Felix down at the same time. 

Felix acts like a person who can’t handle past a certain level of pleasure. Like he can’t believe anything can feel this good. The lack of control makes him skittish. Sylvain’s solution is to build up to it slowly, relentlessly, until Felix is shaking and his hair’s sticking to his sweaty face and each breath sounds like he’s panting for air. Sylvain makes sure every inch of Felix gets some attention: he sucks on his nipples, bites his damp throat, plays with the rim of his asshole, caresses up and down his spine, and just keeps grinding his thick cock into Felix’s ass. Just keeps making Felix sit in his lap and take it. Sometimes Felix’ll say scratchily, “Fuck you, you—f-fuck,” which Sylvain takes to mean he’s doing a pretty great job. 

When it’s finally time for Felix to come, he’s so riled up Sylvain barely has to touch him. He jerks Felix’s cock, nice and easy, and Felix comes with a raw, destroyed little noise. He jams his face against Sylvain’s collarbone. His body clenches down beautifully. Sylvain can feel the convulsions around his dick. He has to breathe shallowly, steadying himself.

“Hey,” he nuzzles Felix’s ear, almost doesn’t recognize the honeyed hoarseness of his voice, “you good?”

Felix doesn’t say, “Keep going,” so much as he sighs it, pressing his open mouth to Sylvain’s shoulder. That’ll do some things for a guy’s ego.

Sylvain flips Felix onto his back. There’s not an ounce of tension left in him. His stomach’s wet with his own spunk. Sylvain’s so hard for Felix it’s making him desperate. Honestly Felix could blow on his dick and he’d probably come. Instead Felix digs his heels against Sylvain’s ass and finally forces Sylvain to fuck him more roughly. He guides Sylvain into his body, the oversensitivity making his thighs quiver, and Sylvain groans, coming again. 

As he settles back to earth, he can feel Felix rubbing his back, tracing the muscles. 

-

Afterwards, there are too many wet spots to be avoided. Felix doesn’t care but Sylvain can be kind of a princess sometimes. He pulls all the extra pillows and blankets out of the hotel closet like it’s a slumber party and they sit on the carpeted floor instead, waiting for the mattress to dry.

Sylvain doesn’t even know what they talk about. His dad, a couple times. Ingrid and The Lost Year. Tom Cruise’s performance in _Cocktail_. Why Tom Cruise can be a scientologist and everyone’s cool with that, but Sylvain was “controversial” for calling Volkhard von Arundel a “fucking creep” back in 2014? He’s a fucking creep, okay? They talk about Felix’s frankly psychotic workout regimen. Felix’s mom, and how sometimes Felix feels like her death during childbirth was what ultimately destined him to have to miss someone every single day of his life. Dimitri. Felix’s past AD gig on a shitty TV show. It was one of those shows about zombies, the year that everything in pop culture was about zombies. He can’t even explain why he hated it so much. He’d thought he was someone who could just concentrate on the work and take pride in doing it well. Now all of a sudden here he was, wanting to care about the reason he was doing it. 

Time passes. The mattress is bone dry by now. Felix falls quiet, having run out of steam. He’s been leaning back against Sylvain’s chest, but he sits up so he can roll out a crick in his neck. 

Sylvain always knew Felix had some ink. He’s seen the tattoos on both arms, but never got a full glimpse of the one on Felix’s back before tonight. It’s the head of a lion, half realistic, half geometric. All black and gray, except for the blue paint streak running diagonal through it. The tattoo spans from the center of Felix’s upper spine to the knob of his left shoulder. About the size of Sylvain’s hand.

Felix can sense him looking. “I went through a phase,” he says stiffly.

The timing and context of that phase is clear as day. Glenn’s Oscar was for a film called _Lionheart_. Sylvain kisses Felix’s shoulder. He doesn’t know how to face the intimacy of this moment. “I like it.”

Felix doesn’t say anything, but he turns around to offer his own mouth for Sylvain to kiss instead. 

-

Hours later, Sylvain wakes up and has a normal, low-key freak out.

He frees himself from Felix’s limbs—the man is _not_ a graceful sleeper—and stumbles into the bathroom. There, he turns on the lights and squints at his own face in the mirror. He tries to visualize—he visualizes a river. Water running over rock until it’s smooth. Water passing constantly, drowning out the noise, rising and falling in cycles, rising and falling, and rising, and rising above his head.

Okay, this isn’t working. He looks at the thought directly. 

_Who do you think you are?_ it says. _The last time you got a taste of this, you set yourself on fire, and you’re going to do it again._

Choose your fighter. His mini-Ingrid would challenge and tear the thought apart, but Sylvain doesn’t have the energy for that. He lets mini-Mercedes take over. Has anything happened yet? No. Is it going to happen? Survey says “maybe”, but what is he accomplishing here, having a stand-off with his own reflection like he’s a character in an Aronofsky movie? The sun isn’t even up. The world hasn’t resumed turning yet. Even the hotel air conditioning has gone silent. The only sound is Felix stirring awake in bed. 

“It’s early,” Felix says, husky and irritated. 

Can’t argue with that. Sylvain crawls back under the covers. Felix slings an arm over Sylvain immediately. He shoves his face into the junction of Sylvain’s neck and shoulder. 

“Your heart’s beating really fast,” Felix grunts.

Sylvain could joke, “That’s for you, babe,” but instead he just says, “Yeah. Sorry.”

Felix lays his palm against Sylvain’s chest. He drifts off again within seconds. 

Sylvain kisses the top of Felix’s head, and stares up at the ceiling, and eventually he falls back asleep too. 

-

Everyone goes home except Sylvain and Felix. They book another hotel and stay in Seattle an extra three days. One day to do what Felix wants to do, one day to do what Sylvain wants to do, and one day to fuck each other’s brains out some more.

Except the second they check into the hotel, the schedule changes and day one becomes their designated athletic marathon sex day instead. This is good because it gets all the fucking out of their systems. By the end Sylvain’s dehydrated and sore and even the sight of Felix on his back, come splattered all over his stomach, barely makes his dick twitch. Sylvain manages to make it to the mini-fridge and grab a water bottle. When he approaches the bed again, Felix has propped himself up onto his elbows, assessing Sylvain’s chest, his thighs, like he’s figuring out if he wants to go another round. Then he drops back against the bed with an exhausted huff, thank god. 

This is also good because Sylvain blows everything up on day three, so at least he gets laid first.

What Sylvain wants to do is art museums. It’s a weekend, the sun’s out, the museum space is gorgeous, and Sylvain goes nuts for Gentileschi’s _Judith and Holofernes_ each and every time. To his delight, Felix likes it too. “Cool beheading,” he says, which is both gratifying and hilarious. 

On their way out of the exhibit, they pass by a couple and their young daughter coming in. One of the dads covers his girl’s eyes, saying mildly, “Well that’s graphic.” They can hear the other dad: “It’s a famous piece of art, honey, just let her see,” followed by, “Yeah, let me see!”

And for one reason or another Sylvain’s brain will not let it go. 

It sticks with him through the 17th century porcelain room, the 20th century American modernism. It sticks with him through dinner downtown. He can’t fucking shake it.

Back at the hotel, he takes a long hot shower and lets his head hang under the spray and tries to visualize—

Himself, older. Felix beside him. A shared life. What the fuck does that look like?

“What are you doing for New Years Eve?” Felix asks when Sylvain gets out. He’s sitting against the headboard, looking at something on his phone. 

“Ingrid and I have this annual ski trip we always take around that time of year.” Sylvain towels his hair dry. “What’s up?”

“Dimitri’s hosting a party.”

Sylvain hunts through his luggage and pulls on a clean pair of underwear. When he turns back around, Felix is looking at him now.

“I’m trying to ask if you want to come,” Felix says plainly.

Sylvain shoots him a smile. “Like I said, ski trip.”

Felix shrugs. “Come before the holidays. Or after. The party doesn’t matter.”

Sylvain puts on a t-shirt next. Buys himself some time. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, babe.”

“Why not.”

“We don’t want to rush into anything, right? I mean, we’re having fun so far.”

The guardedness that Felix began to let down around Sylvain weeks ago is flying back up. He asks warily: “Are you not serious about this?”

And whatever heart rot Sylvain’s been fighting off for the entire day starts to ingest and spread. 

“Sweetheart—”

“Don’t call me that,” Felix says, getting testy. 

“Felix,” Sylvain amends. “We live in two different cities. And me plus L.A. is an equation that can be kind of,” he makes an explosion gesture. “I’m not at my best.”

Felix is trying to stay level. Sylvain can see him trying. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care what you think is your best or your worst—”

“C’mon,” Sylvain interrupts with a laugh. “You weren’t there. What would you know about it?”

Felix just watches him, gaze hardening, like he’s trying to anticipate an opponent’s next move. Sylvain can’t stop. He doesn’t know if he’s truly pissed off or if he’s doing this just to do it. Just to do it and see if he survives.

“Listen, I’m gonna be honest. I don’t really feel like chasing you around the country just for you to cut and run all over again.”

Felix’s voice lowers into a growl. “Stop throwing that shit in my face.”

“What part of it isn’t true?” Sylvain asks. “Are you telling me you would’ve, what, held my hand down Sunset Boulevard? Held my hair back over the toilet? That’s not you. The accident was just lucky timing.”

Sylvain’s blood is roaring like he just threw himself off the side of a building. Felix gets off the bed and slowly comes up to him. It’s like watching a jaguar approach, sleek and tightly muscled and lethal. 

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” Felix says dangerously.

“I think you heard me,” Sylvain says.

Felix is red with anger. The last time Sylvain saw Felix this livid, he was soaked and shivering because Sylvain didn’t have the guts to jump in with him. Something in his expression trembles, right on the edge; then it shuts down completely. 

He pushes past Sylvain. “Fine,” he says. “I don’t give a shit.”

“Knew I could count on you,” Sylvain says, before the hotel room door slams shut. And then it’s just him, like he’s always fucking wanted.

\- 

Sylvain’s flight takes off early the next morning. Felix hasn’t returned by the time he needs to go to the airport. Sylvain waits until he’s at the gate, but he knows that if he gets on that plane without calling, it’s one more thing he’ll never forgive himself for. 

On the third try, Felix picks up without saying anything. For a minute they play chicken over the phone.

Sylvain caves first: “Where’d you disappear to?”

“The gym.” Of course Felix releases aggression through an unforgiving amount of exercise. “Are you at the airport?” 

“Yeah. My flight’s boarding soon.”

More of that brutal silence.

Sylvain looks out at the planes getting ready to take off. It’s almost unbearable to think about how many people are coming and going, every minute of the day. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean any of that shit I said yesterday. It was unfair. I don’t know—there’s something wrong with me, I don’t know how to do this the right way. I don’t have it in me, you know?”

He takes a deep breath. “So I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I—” Come on. Come on, you fucking coward. “I’m glad I got to see you again.”

Felix asks, “Are you done?”

“Pretty much,” Sylvain says.

This is when he expects Felix to hang up, but Felix doesn’t. He stays on the line without making a sound. Boarding announcements begin over the intercom. Sylvain hears them distantly as if they’re coming through a long tunnel. He doesn’t know which direction he’s walking in. 

Finally Felix grits out: “You have my number. You have my address. Come when you’re ready. I’ll wait.”

Sylvain has to replay each word before their meaning is made clear. “Felix, you can’t do that.” 

“Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” Felix snarls. Sylvain can picture perfectly the wounded face that goes along with that wounded voice. “You asshole. You really think I have no idea who you are.”

Then Felix does hang up, and Sylvain has missed the call for business class. 

Ingrid picks him up from JFK. She gives him a quick hug before loading his bags into her car. Then she gets a better look at his face, and circles back around for another hug that lasts until some douchebag in a Porsche honks at them to keep it moving.

-

October: Edelgard calls. Some of the audio for one of the scenes got all messed up. The equipment picked up too much rain. She needs Sylvain to fly out to L.A. and do some ADR. 

While he’s in town, he hits up Bernadetta and she has him over for lunch. She lives in Silverlake, a little more removed from the Hollywood of it all. But her small home is all-California, from the selection of potted plants to the natural tones to all the windows a person can get. “When I’m deep in my writing I can forget to leave the house,” she confesses. “So it’s nice to bring the outdoors inside.”

She shows him around her neighborhood that afternoon. They chat about her novel, the film festival circuit next year, and then they’re just companionably quiet, the way it can be with Bernadetta sometimes. She takes him to her best spot, which is a sunny residential street near her go-to coffee shop, lined by colorful houses and fan palms and tropical vining bougainvillea. They linger at a tall orange tree growing in somebody’s front yard, branching over the white fence. “This one is my favorite,” Bernadetta says, hushed. “Sometimes I like imagining who lives here.” Then her cheeks color. “Sorry. That’s so weird. Forget I said that.”

“No,” Sylvain says reassuringly, “don’t worry, I get it.” He touches a green leaf, then a smooth, textured orange skin. Somebody comes out here every day to take care of this tree. “It’s a beautiful house.”

November: Dorothea’s in New York for a few days. Sylvain takes her to a Broadway play, and afterwards some late-night coffee. Dorothea calls every one of her clients her favorite client, but Sylvain thinks he could actually be her favorite. She seems happy with the way his career is picking up. There’s good buzz. The media loves a well-branded renaissance. 

“I want to call it Sylvain Awakening,” she says, because she is at her core a theater nerd. 

“That reminds me.” Sylvain pulls the signed _Officers Academy_ playbill out of his coat. “I know it’s early, but I couldn’t wait. Happy holidays, D.”

When she realizes what it is, a look comes over her face. It’s hard to describe. It’s the look of someone thinking about the brightest and most hopeful part of a very difficult period of her life. A whole host of conflicting, messy emotions always comes along for the ride. Sylvain wonders briefly if this idea was a mistake, but Dorothea’s smiling too, shiny and awed as she reads the inscription. 

“Do I win this year?” he asks. 

She closes the playbill and glances back up at him. “You know, you’re a decent guy, Sylvain.”

The temperature in the city has plummeted in recent days. True winter’s just around the corner. By the time Sylvain heads home, it’s chilly enough that he can see his own breath. His hands are dry and freezing without gloves. Even in this weather he has to dodge around the ubiquitous winged masses of pigeons. They bob around the sidewalks and subway stations, cooing and gurgling. They’ll be here in January too, through the snowstorms and blistering cold. Their reliability is comforting. Some creatures can make a life anywhere.

-

December: the gifts begin accumulating. Sylvain doesn’t believe in waiting for the 25th. He opens the packages as they come.

Mercedes drops her gift off in person, a couple days early because she spends Christmas Day itself at the penitentiary upstate with her brother. She’s been on a knitting kick lately. The scarf she wraps around Sylvain’s neck is chunky and warm. “You look so cute,” Mercedes exclaims, fluffing it up. “Promise me you’ll wear it when it’s cold. I don’t want to worry about you.”

Annette sends a card, one that sings when you open it. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. “Happy holidays!” she’s written inside, and attached the photo strip the three of them took together at the tiki bar.

On the 20th, a small box arrives with no return address or sender name. “Is this a bomb?” Ingrid says, shaking the package. She came over to pack together for their ski trip. 

Sylvain can guess who it’s from and there’s a good chance it could be a bomb. He uses his keys to rip through the tape. He opens the box and digs through the styrofoam. 

It’s a mug. There’s a haughty duck on it: “do not duck with me.”

His chest feels tight. He’s being annihilated by a hunk of ceramic and an animal pun.

“Hey, Ingrid,” he calls out, after some time.

Ingrid reappears lugging a suitcase out of Sylvain’s bedroom. “Yes?”

He’s not sure how to ask this, so he just asks. “You remember when I relapsed?”

Obviously she does. Sylvain could never forget either, what he’s put her through, or how deeply he’d hurt her back then by going to Mercedes first. 

“I remember,” Ingrid says. 

Sylvain turns the mug over in his hands. “How did you decide you could trust me again?” he asks. 

Ingrid abandons the suitcase and sits down next to Sylvain on the couch. “It wasn’t like that.”

Sylvain raises an eyebrow at her.

“It wasn’t,” Ingrid defends. She takes a moment, collecting her thoughts. When she speaks again, her voice is gentler.

“I won’t lie, I was upset with you, and really sad. But—it happens. You were in a lot of pain, and you needed someone to tell you to keep going anyway. I think you still do, honestly.” She bites her lip and finishes: “It’s okay if that person is Mercedes, or me, or just yourself. As long as you hear it.”

Sylvain takes in a shaky new lungful of air. “I love you,” he says.

“I know,” Ingrid says, like she’s Han fucking Solo. “Now will you help me pack, please?”

Sylvain sets down the mug and stands back up. “How do you feel about skiing on the west coast this year instead? Lake Tahoe?”

Ingrid frowns, arms crossed, ready to debate. “It’s too late to be changing our plans.”

“Dorothea’ll be there,” Sylvain says, and wins. 

-

For someone so rich, Dimitri’s L.A. home is pretty understated. It’s approachable, millionaire-next-door. Sylvain can hear the music, the people. Then the front door opens and his only thought is, _Whoa. Hot Bodyguard._

Hot Bodyguard stares at him. “Can I help you?”

“Uh, hey, how’s it going,” Sylvain says. He offers the fruit basket that Ingrid helped him pick out. Something to communicate: Sorry for crashing your party, but technically I was invited. 

“I’m looking for a guy,” he adds. “This tall. Long hair. Kind of a wet cat vibe?”

The combination of those three descriptors brings reluctant recognition to Hot Bodyguard’s face. “Ah,” he sighs. “Yes.”

Then an attractive pirate appears too.

“Sylvain!” Dimitri says. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“Hey,” Sylvain says again, and can’t help but smile. “Wow. How’ve you been?”

Dimitri smiles back. “That’s a complicated question. Would you like to come in?” 

Sylvain follows Dimitri and Hot Bodyguard Dedue through a maze of mid-century modern architecture. He spots Claude, plus around thirty more industry folk. A small party, by L.A. standards. It’s so cool that all of these people are here to witness Sylvain ripping his shirt open, running towards Felix, pointing at his own naked heart and shouting, _Any chance you’re still into this?_

Dimitri is a gracious host who shows Sylvain to the refreshments and introduces him to a few other guests. “Is Felix around?” Sylvain asks, between reuniting with Hilda (“Heyyy,” she greets) and Lorenz (“Hello,” he simpers).

“I was with him just a moment ago,” says Dimitri, “though I’m not sure where he’s gone now. You could try the pool.”

Dimitri knows Felix well. He is in fact sitting by the pool, shoes off, legs submerged halfway up his calves. He’s wearing a sweater. Someone has also forced him to wear a silver and gold “Happy New Year” headband. He’s smoking. He’s always smoking. He told Sylvain once that he started because when he was younger he didn’t know how else to behave naturally with his hands. His hair’s down. That’s always the part that kicks Sylvain in the chest. The sound system is blasting every cover of _Auld Lang Syne_ known to man. Indie folk. Mariah Carey. The traditional big band with the brassy horns and piano, smooth and mellow and aching. 

Sylvain visualizes himself walking to Felix, one step at a time. 

He makes it over, eventually. Felix looks up. His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t stand up to punch Sylvain in the face, so that’s a victory. 

“You’re overdressed,” Felix comments.

“Yeah, I sort of made a promise to someone.”

Sylvain unwraps the scarf, letting his neck breathe. It’s an unseasonable 60 degrees on this side of the country, but you take the good with the bad. He removes his own shoes and socks, rolls up his pants. Then he sits down too, as close as he thinks Felix will allow. 

He didn’t prepare anything to say. He figured Felix didn’t want to be _Jerry Maguire_ ’d. Felix only wanted Sylvain to fly out and be with him. Things sound less scary when you stick the word “only” in front of them.

“Are you mad at me?” Sylvain asks. 

Felix scoffs. “Did you come here to make me mad at you?”

Sylvain shakes his head. He can feel the softness of his own expression. He’s fucking terrified of it.

They sit there together for who knows how long. The pool’s heated, so it’s comfortable. The water distorts their legs and feet. Felix stubs out his cigarette. At some point their hands overlap on the pool’s edge. Sylvain isn’t sure who goes for it first, but they are only holding hands. They are only moving closer to each other, ceaselessly over time. 

Somewhere, there’s a countdown. 

“What do you say?” Sylvain says. “Third time’s the charm?”

Felix rests his head against Sylvain’s shoulder. “I guess we’ll find out,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> felix’s tats are all in the style of [oscar akermo](https://www.instagram.com/oscarakermo/?hl=en)  
> didn’t manage to squeeze in the ignatz cameo but he does vfx. and marianne is the owner of felix’s airbnb :')
> 
> a brief soundtrack:  
> [boygenius - bite the hand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZlR6DjehDc)  
> [bully - I remember](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04QhNfSprCs)  
> [waxahatchee - singer’s no star](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWYYAM0T1x8)
> 
> it’s done! shout-out to every movie review, celebrity profile, and interview that I read in a fugue state and definitely stole lines from  
> \+ shout-out to “stoker” (2013), “the beguiled” (2017), “hard candy” (2005), and “the babadook” (2014), for “a little plague” inspiration  
> \+ shout-out to lindsay lohan  
> thanks to everyone for reading this! I’m just a shy fandom lurker now but I love ya & I’ve truly cherished the feedback. happy holidays!


End file.
